


Can't Lose What You Never Had

by Tesserae



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s05e19 Vegas, Episode: s07e06 Slash Fiction, M/M, Season 7 Spoilers, Stargate Atlantis AU: Vegas, casefic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-15
Updated: 2012-06-15
Packaged: 2017-11-07 19:44:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/434677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tesserae/pseuds/Tesserae
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean thinks he’s hunting some kind of vampire right up to the minute the fighter jets come screaming over the hill and the creature’s trailer disappears in a ball of fire. Unfortunately, that’s just the beginning of the case: one killer may be dead, but something is still leaving inexplicable corpses around Las Vegas. Hunting alone after Sam stormed off in the aftermath of <i>Slash Fiction</i>, Dean finds himself needing to ask the half-dead ex-cop he hauled out of the desert for help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can't Lose What You Never Had

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the SNcross 2012 big bang. Thanks to filenotch for the ass-kicking beta, and to amber1960 for the gorgeous artwork!
> 
> **Link to Story Master Post:** [ Fic](http://users.livejournal.com/tesserae_/415745.html)  
>  **Link to Art Master Post:**[ Art](http://amber1960.livejournal.com/99194.html)

Dean thinks it’s some kind of vampire right up until the fighter jets come screaming over the hill and the creature’s trailer disappears in a ball of fire. The force of the explosion knocks him on his ass, banging the air out of his lungs and leaving him with a mouthful of grit even though he’s a couple hundred yards away from Ground Zero.

Swearing, he rolls himself behind a rock and inches forward on his elbows until he can see the valley floor. The trailer is pretty much gone, reduced to bits of flaming debris slowly drifting down through a haze of oily black smoke. Dean fishes a bottle of water out of his bag, pouring half of it over his face and the rest into his mouth before spitting it out onto the ground along with what feels like an entire picnic’s worth of sand. Fucking desert. He’d sworn he wasn’t going to go on any more desert hunts, not after dragging Bobby’s ass out of the Mojave that last –

Down on the ground, there’s a flash of movement, and Dean remembers that the last thing he’d seen before the firefight was some idiot trying to take out the vampire with a semi-automatic. The vampire, who’d been packing serious heat, had blown the guy back into the side of his car. Dean had assumed he was dead and dismissed him, but whatever it is moves again, and Dean squints down at the scene.

Yeah, not so much dead as wounded, it looks like, which makes him a witness, possibly the only one. Dean hauls himself to his feet and pelts down the rocky trail, pulling his own gun out of his jeans as he goes. He doesn’t know who this guy is, but anybody stupid enough to take on an armed vampire has at least the potential to put a bullet into Dean.

He skids to a stop next to the battered red Camaro. There’s a dark-haired man a little older than Dean sprawled against the wheel well, legs spread out in front of him and one hand clapped against his shoulder. He’s pale underneath a scruff of beard, lips pressed together and eyes invisible behind mirrored shades. He glances up as Dean drops to his knees, his gaze seeming to settle on the gun in Dean’s hand.

“You here to kill me?” he rasps.

“Nah, I’m not sure I could top all that, not at the moment, anyways,” Dean says, motioning toward the smoking wreckage behind the car. He glances back as something settles into the flames, but the hills behind him hold nothing but the shadows deepening as the sun sets. No more jets, at least for the moment, and the man in front of him isn’t going to be reaching for a weapon anytime soon. Dean shoves his gun back into his waistband. “You think your friends are coming back?”

The man shakes his head. “Not if they think they got me, too.” He shifts against the car, the movement surprising a grunt out of him. Dean swings the bag off his shoulder and unzips it, pulling out the first aid kit.

“First things first.” He unscrews his flask and holds it out. “Drink.”

The man quirks an eyebrow at him but takes an obedient swig, and Dean pulls his hand away from his shoulder. The bullet had gone in neatly enough: there’s a small hole in the linen of the man’s shirt, but the dark blood staining the front of the shirt and the absence of an exit wound mean that he’s going to need to find a doctor sooner instead of later. He pulls a couple of gauze pads out of the kit and rips their packages open, folding them together and pressing them against the wound. 

He watches critically as blood starts to seep through the gauze, grabs the last clean towel in the bag and fashions a serviceable bandage, strapping tape around the man’s shoulder and chest. When he’s done, he sits back on his heels. Poor guy looks a little like he’d been forced to play nurse with someone’s kid, but at least he won’t bleed to death while Dean’s looking for the local Dr. Sexy. He brushes off his hands and gets to his feet.

“I’d offer you another slug of whiskey but I think we need to get you out of here. Think you can walk?”

The guy drags a shaking hand across his face. “If I say no what are you going to do?”

Dean gazes up at the sky. It’s getting dark, and with the sun gone, the wind is cold against his neck. It’s a relief after the heat of the last couple of days, but if he doesn’t get them both inside where it’s warm, get some fluids and maybe antibiotics into the guy, he’s going to have a corpse on his hands by morning. Then he’ll never figure out just what the fuck he’d been chasing, and maybe more importantly, if it was really dead.

But if the guy can’t walk… He pulls a flashlight out of his bag and steps around to the front of the Camaro. The body’s been shot to hell – Dean doesn’t even want to think about trying to fix that kind of damage – but if none of them hit the engine block, he might be able to get it started. And the car he’d stolen the previous week isn’t all that far away; Dean had followed the vampire’s motor home, checked the turn it made and then parked another quarter mile down the road and hiked back. If he can get that distance out of the old heap it will put them that much closer to Not Here.

When he pops the hood he can’t smell any coolant. A quick check of the ground under the car’s ass doesn’t show any gasoline, so he slides into the driver’s seat and turns the key in the ignition. Half expecting the thing to explode in his hands, he’s startled when the engine coughs and then sputters to life. “Holy shit,” he breathes, starting to think he might just pull this one off.

Once he tosses a small black bag into the back seat and gets the guy settled into the front, Dean swings around in a shallow U and heads back toward the road. The engine, at least, isn’t complaining too loudly, although from the way the temperature gauge is creeping up, he’s pretty sure the radiator has at least one leak. He pats the cracked vinyl of the dash. “Your detailing is for shit but her engine is sound.”

“You try living outdoors in 120-degree weather, let’s see how pretty you are by 40.” His voice sounds strained, but there’s a hint of laughter underneath the rasp, and Dean glances over.

“Point,” he says. “Name’s Andy Jackson, by the way.”

The man lifts a dark eyebrow. “No, it’s not. But that’s okay. I probably wouldn’t tell me who I was either.” He stops, hissing a little as Dean bumps the car to a stop. “Mine’s Sheppard. I’d offer to shake hands, but…”

Dean barks a laugh. “S’okay, as long as you don’t bleed all over my upholstery I won’t hold it against you.” Hadn’t the cop in the clippings back at his motel been named Sheppard? He files the question away, one more thing to ask if the guy lives, and steps on the emergency brake. The car gurgles to a stop and he climbs out, figuring he’ll get Sheppard settled into the back seat, but the guy surprises him by hauling the bag out of the back and heading resolutely, if unsteadily, for the passenger’s seat. “You sure you don’t want to stretch out, get comfortable?”

Sheppard gives him a flat look and settles himself into the car. “You don’t know where we’re going.”

_Huh, logical_. Dean closes the door behind him. The car, a sweet ’68 GTO that’s been abused with Glenn Beck stickers, starts up with a satisfying roar. Sheppard twitches his lips into a brief grin and Dean, feeling pleased with himself, guides them carefully onto the road. “So, where are we going?” 

Sheppard, his eyes still closed, says, “Wake me up when you see signs for Pahrump, I’ll guide you in. Meantime, just drive.”

If Sam were here, Dean thinks, he’d have a million questions. Dean’s willing to start with _what the fuck is in Pahrump?_ as long as they get to the ones he figures Sam would want answered eventually, like how come the freaking Air Force blew up the monster he’d thought he was hunting. And maybe why they wanted to take out the guy next to him, too.

But Sam’s not here. And Dean’s going to get his answers as soon as they get to Pahrump. For the moment, he’s good. 

He shoves Jeff Beck into the tape deck and drives.

*

Pahrump turns out to be a long low stretch of boarded-up storefronts broken up by check cashing joints and the kinds of motels Dean recognizes from every other highway town he’s ever been in. Sheppard wakes up when Dean nudges him, looks around and guides Dean down a series of side streets until they pull up in front of a blue-painted ranch house. The house looks like the rest of Pahrump, tired after a long day at a badly-paid job.

Dean glances over. “You live here?” He’s surprised; the paint job may be a match to the Camaro’s, but he really hadn’t figured Sheppard for a flamingos-and-fake-flowers kind of guy. “It’s… cheerful,” he adds, “but unless you’re married to an ER doc I ain’t leaving you here to bleed to death.” 

Sheppard laughs rustily. “Settle down, Mom. Friend of mine lives here, she can patch me up. You want to get rid of me, drive around back and knock on the door of the first trailer. Ask for Doc Emmagan. Tell her it’s John.” 

Behind the house, a road lined with trailers straggles off toward the hills. Dean glances at Sheppard, sweating in spite of the open window. Whoever Doc Emmagan is, he hopes she’s got the good drugs stashed in her beer fridge. 

The trailer’s front door rattles when he pounds on it, and he’s about to force the flimsy lock when it swings open abruptly. “The fuck?” a small woman with dark skin and reddish hair says. “Who the hell are you?” She’s in shorts and a heavy sweatshirt that says UNLV in peeling letters, and from the way her hand is out of sight behind the doorjamb he suspects she may be armed. 

Hoping it’s just a baseball bat, he jerks his thumb back toward his car. “Sheppard. Says you’re a doctor, and he needs one.”

“John?” There’s a thump, something heavy hitting the floor, and she pushes past him. “John?” 

“Teyla.” His voice cracks on the word, and she kneels down. “I’m gonna need to owe you another one.”

“No such thing, John,” she says, and then somehow there’s a bed, a lot of purposeful activity involving scalpels, needles and a morphine drip, and when it’s over, Sheppard’s wearing a heavy bandage around his left shoulder and the slack-jawed look of a man sleeping off _serious_ painkillers.

Doc Emmagan pulls a thin blanket up over her patient and motions Dean out of the room. “Grab a couple of beers, I’ll be right out.”

*

It’s full dark outside but the tiny kidney-shaped pool in the middle of the back yard is lit up, spilling green light onto the concrete. If the place weren’t so far off the main road he’d guess it was some kind of motel, but there doesn’t seem to be a real parking lot – the GTO’s still the only car pulled up by the trailers.

“Where are we?” he asks as the doc – Teyla, Sheppard had called her – drops into the chair next to his and toes off her sneakers.

“Really?” She sits up and peers at him when he doesn’t answer. “You don’t know this place? Where did John find you?”

“Hey.” He pushes the chair back, half-minded to climb into his car and head back to Vegas, leave Sheppard to his own devices. One thing Dean had learned, there was always another way to track down the monsters. 

“Sit down,” she says calmly, twisting the cap off her beer and taking a deep swig. At that moment, lights come on behind a sliding glass door facing the pool. In the spaces between the half-closed vertical blinds, Dean can see a woman start to take her clothes off, and behind her, the shadow of a man. More lights come on, and somewhere to the rear of him there’s the sound of wheels on gravel and the blare of an over-priced car stereo – Journey, Dean notes with a frown – followed by the slam of a door and heavy footsteps, then more music, a woman’s voice this time.

He glances toward the lights, where the room’s inhabitants have clearly moved to a bed, and then back at the doc, who appears to be struggling to keep a straight face.

“Holy crap,” he says, and she lets the grin spread across her face.

“Welcome to the Blue Bunny Ranch, Mister Jackson. Now, where’d you say you met John Sheppard?” 

Underneath the smile there’s steel in her voice, and he can’t quite shake the suspicion that somehow, somewhere, she’s got a gun trained on him. He drops both hands onto the table and curses the unknown people with their half-closed blinds for a sucker bet.

“Found him in the desert. Someth- some _one_ was using him for target practice. He said to bring him here.”

“So instead of calling 911 like a good taxpayer, you put a gutshot man into your car and asked him where he wanted to go?”

She sounds like Sam, he thinks irritably. “Actually, I had a singing telegram for him, and my agency won’t cough up the bucks without a signature.” 

“Yeah? You want to hum a few bars?” 

“You want to show me the benjamins first?” He meets her eyes, holding her clear dark gaze until she shifts slightly in her seat and starts to laugh. 

“Is Andrew Jackson really your name?”

He wraps one hand around the cold wet glass of his beer bottle and raises it to his lips. When the liquid hits his throat, he realizes how thirsty he is and drains it. “No,” he says finally. “You really a whorehouse doc?”

“Yeah,” she says, and this time there’s more than just steel in her voice, an echoing sadness that she bites off easily as if from long habit. “Maybe someday I’ll tell you why. Meantime, I’m going to check on John.” She picks up his bottle, leaving hers on the table. “Finish that, would you? And don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back.”

Don’t go anywhere, huh? Dean eases his chair back and gets carefully to his feet. He’s stiff from the hike up the hill earlier and, now that the temperature’s dropped, not entirely sure his knee won’t give him away. But it stays quiet, and casting a wistful look toward the now-dark bedroom behind him, he pads back over to the trailer. There’s light slipping out through an open back window, and through it, there’s a voice, too low to make out any words. Gingerly, he steps closer, hoping to avoid any dead leaves or live snakes. 

“—no, just overnight,” he hears her say. “I’ll get them out of here tomorrow.” There’s a pause, then a dry laugh. “No, the Parfait Amour will be perfect. But Jake, tell the girls no freebies – he’s got credit cards in four different names, and I’m pretty sure Spiro Agnew is dead.”

Dean shoves a hand into his pocket and, finding it empty, gives up on the subtle routine in favor of the more direct approach. He slams around to the trailer’s front door and yanks it open. Doc Emmagan is standing in front of him, cell phone in one hand and a tire iron in the other. 

Must have been the tire iron he’d heard drop earlier. He narrows his eyes at her without taking them off the weapon. “You took my –“

“Wallet?” she says, nastily. “Yes, I did. You show up on my doorstep with one of my oldest friends bleeding to death from a gunshot wound and no good answers about how or why? You bet I took your wallet.” 

He lets his glance crawl down her small form and then back up. She’s holding herself utterly still, the tire iron light in her grip and her weight balanced on the balls of her feet. Clearly, she’s not carrying - well, anything except _his fucking wallet_ \- because she doesn’t need to, not in close quarters like this. 

Moving slowly, deliberately, Dean leans back against the doorway and fits one hand into the small of his back. He’s pleased to see her eyes widen slightly. “Tell you what. Give me my wallet back - _with_ the credit cards - and thirty minutes with Sheppard, and I promise I’ll get out of your hair.” He glances up at the ceiling’s gold-flecked tiles. “Nice place you got here. Be a shame if --”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she snaps, and pulls his wallet out of her pocket. “Here. And come back tomorrow, if you want to talk to John. I wouldn’t wake him up tonight if you had Richard Nixon’s Visa card and a note from Pat saying you could use it.” She tosses him the wallet and hefts the tire iron, looking pointedly over his shoulder at the door.

“Okay, okay,” he says. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got the same questions you do, Doc, you know?” It’s not quite a lie, but he gives her one of Sam’s earnest looks anyways, and when she relaxes minutely, he counts it as a win and slips out. 

He’ll get her answers out of John Sheppard, and his as well, if he has to doctor up the IV with coffee himself. Meantime, he needs to see to the car – as much bleeding as Sheppard was doing, Dean’ll be surprised if none of it ended up on the seat. 

And the car – the GTO’s not his, and he’ll be driving something else in a week, but the car’s problems are something manageable. The thing with Sam, maybe not so much – and the one with Castiel not at all. But cars – yeah, there’s nothing about cars that’s beyond his grasp.

Except, of course, his fucking _Impala_.

~*~  


The next morning he gets up at the asscrack of dawn and hauls himself out to the Blue Bunny, stopping for a dozen donuts and the Vegas paper on the way. The back roads of Pahrump are quiet – hell, Pahrump itself is quiet, the motel parking lots are mostly empty and no checks needing cashing at this hour. 

Dean pats the pink box on the seat beside him and turns off the radio. This time, instead of turning into the Bunny’s driveway, he overshoots it and swings into the road that runs along the side of the trailers. Pulling off onto the hard-baked shoulder, he switches off the engine and coasts to a stop under a feathery-looking tree a scant hundred yards from his target. He slides out of the car, grabbing the donuts and a flathead screwdriver, and eases the door shut. 

A couple of quick moves and a little force gets him past the lock on Doc Emmagan’s door and into her trailer. The miniscule waiting room is quiet enough that he can hear snoring over the refrigerator’s compressor, and grinning into the gloom, he sets the box down on the kitchen counter and grabs a jelly-filled donut. 

Sheppard’s room is tiny. Dean opens the blinds on its single window, filling the room with a grimy light, and nods appreciatively at the 1970s-era condom ads and VD posters pinned to the walls. He unfolds his paper and settles down into a plastic-covered chair to wait. 

It doesn’t take long. He’s barely finished wiping the powdered sugar off his chin when the man on the bed stirs and mutters something. Dean winces in sympathy and lowers his paper. 

“Feeling better?” he says cheerfully.

“Fuck you.” Sheppard cracks one eye open and glares at Dean. It’s a little like being hissed at by a small kitten, Dean thinks; the man in the bed looks, if anything, worse than he had bleeding all over the place the day before. Still, if he’s well enough to be ungrateful, he’s obviously getting better. 

Dean hoists himself to his feet. “Pleased to meet you too. I’ll just be going – I’m sure you can catch a cab back to Vegas from here.” 

Sheppard opens the other eye. “Tell me it’s dead, at least.”

Dean stares at him for a moment. The flat look in Sheppard’s eyes makes him wonder if he hasn’t managed to haul another hunter’s ass out of the desert. He reaches down and picks up the paper, leafing through it for a moment before folding it back into a neat rectangle. “What was that thing anyways?” he asks, keeping his tone conversational in case he was wrong. 

Sheppard doesn’t answer, and Dean sighs. “Well, _if_ it was there and _if_ it could be blown up –“ he starts, allowing himself a small grin when Sheppard flinches “—it’s probably dead. But that’s not really the problem.” 

“No?” Sheppard’s eyes track him as he steps closer to the bed. They widen as Dean sticks the paper in front of his face. “Son of a bitch.” 

“Yep.” Dean pulls the paper away. _MUMMY KILLER STRIKES AGAIN_ , the headline screams in two inch type, and Dean hadn’t needed the calendar on his phone to tell him that this most recent body had been found late last night. While it’s possible the thing he’d been tracking had managed to leave a few more presents under the tree, he’s got the itchy feeling that the gift tag on this one had someone else’s name on it. Dean hopes to fuck Sheppard knows if there are any more vamps running around, and what - short of a couple of fighter jets - will kill them if there are. Being as how he’s fresh out of military-grade ordnance at the moment.

“Fuck,” Sheppard says, trying to get his uninjured right arm underneath him. “Help me up?”

“Why?”

Sheppard gives Dean a pointed stare that takes in the tiny room, the whorehouse it’s attached to and somehow, the entire previous day. “I don’t know,” he starts, irritably. “Maybe so we can go back to Vegas and –“ 

Dean crosses his arms and looks down at Sheppard, focusing deliberately on the bandaged shoulder. The livid edges of a bruise are barely visible where the gauze meets skin, but it doesn’t look like there’s been any more bleeding. He doesn’t expect anything less from a sawbones who can also pick pockets. Especially his. 

Sheppard lets his head fall back onto the pillow. “Yeah, okay, point taken. Not even going to the can on my own for a few more days, am I?”

“No. No, John, you are not.”

Dean turns around slowly. “Mornin’, Doc,” he drawls. “Did you grab a donut? I got the ones with the pink frosting especially for you.”

She smiles sweetly at him. She’s ditched UNLV in favor of a white t-shirt topped by something complicated in a big black and white plaid.

Dean starts to wish he’d brought his gun with him. Behind them, Sheppard clears his throat with an annoyed sound, and both Dean and Doc Emmagan look over.

“Did someone say donuts?” He glances between them. “Are there any jelly ones?”

*

“So, the thing is,” Sheppard says, once the doc’s upped his morphine levels and Dean’s fetched him a donut. “I don’t think I can help you.” He takes a careful bite of the donut and frowns into its center. “Is this grape?”

Dean rolls his eyes, reaches over and plucks the pastry out of Sheppard’s hand. “Time for more happy pills.” He slides the paper onto Sheppard’s lap and taps his finger against the headline. “Before you go night-night, though, would you look at this photo and tell me if this guy looks like the Mummy Killer’s other vics?”

Sheppard tightens his lips but looks down obediently. 

In the picture, the dead man is lying in a bed. His back is to the camera, and even in the pixellated shot he’s obviously old, his skin splotched and sagging and his hair reduced to a wispy fringe ringing his skull. Oddly, he seems to be wearing a pair of black boxer briefs, but Dean’s way past being surprised by other people’s fashion choices. The bed, too, is surprising, a modern platform-style bed with a laptop sitting on the table next to the man’s head. 

Sheppard glances up, frowning. “Does it say where he was found?”

Dean pulls the paper away. “Says here he was found at home, or at least at _someone’s_ home.” He scans the rest of the article. “Yep, residential neighborhood. Why?”

“Odd, that’s all.” 

“Odd what?”

“That it’s a house.” Sheppard closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. “The other vics were all – anonymous, I guess you’d say. Motel people, you know? Not folks with homes.” He reaches behind himself and carefully extracts one of the pillows, dropping it onto the floor. 

Doc Emmagan pushes past Dean. “I think that will be enough for now. Perhaps you could come back a bit later?” Reaching for the IV line running into Sheppard’s left hand, she pulls out a syringe and fits it into the tubing. Eyes not leaving his face, she pushes down on the syringe. “Antibiotics – more morphine later,” she says, and Sheppard gives her a weak smile.

Dean snorts. “Touching. I’ll be back. Sheppard, any kind of sandwich you really hate, so I can be sure to bring you one?”

Back at the car, he pulls out a quarter and flips it into the air. It comes up tails. “I see dead people,” Dean says to the birds watching him hopefully from the barbed wire fencing the parking lot. “But first, I see more coffee.”

~*~  


The Clark County coroner’s office, it turns out, is closer to downtown Vegas than the Strip, across the street from a silvery gray structure that looks like a spaceport. The building itself is desert stone, dusty and low to the ground. Dean parks, shrugs into a jacket and, slipping his credentials into the breast pocket, approaches the front door with a grim frown. When the blond at the desk looks up with a smile, he switches it for a grin and a twinkle and flashes the badge at her.

“Special Agent Jackson. Can you point me toward the body you picked up last night?” 

Her smile slips a notch below sharp brown eyes. “Which one?”

“You got multiple mummified corpses in last night?” If there were a nest of the things slaughtering folk, why hadn’t he seen any more while he was tracking Sheppard’s creature? “How many are we talking here?”

She taps something into her keyboard and tilts her head toward a glass door to Dean’s left. “Nah, only one of those. Room Twelve, and it’s your lucky day, Agent. Doctor Marx is just finishing up with the prelim.”

“Thanks.” _Groucho or Harpo?_ he doesn’t add, and pushes his way through the door to the autopsy bays without looking back. Sam would have been proud of his restraint, he decides, before kicking that thought away.

Not entirely to Dean’s surprise, Dr. Marx doesn’t even look like Chico. He’s solid and balding, his skin drooping forward to hide his eyes and pleat itself around a fleshy, red-veined nose. 

“Doctor Marx?” Dean holds out his badge before folding it back into his pocket. “Agent –“

“—Jackson, yes. Angie said you were on your way.” He wheels his chair back and pushes himself to his feet. “You’re here about the O’Gara case?”

“O’Gara, yeah, the, ah –“

“—mummy killing?” Dr. Marx crosses the room to pull a drawer out of the wall. Dean steels himself. He’s seen any number of gross corpses in the last ten years or so, but there’s something extra-weird about being reduced to the human equivalent of a dead fly. 

“Agent?” Dr. Marx rumbles, and when Dean nods, he pulls the sheet back. 

“You get an ID yet?” 

Dr. Marx shakes his head. “Fed the prints into IAFIS a couple minutes ago. Nothing yet.”

Dean reaches for the vic’s left hand and lifts it. A dark gray band circles the ring finger, tight beneath the swollen knuckle. “Guy’s married. You think the wife knocked him off?”

“Hardly. I leave that crap up to the detectives, Agent. You should maybe watch less TV.” He shuffles back over to his desk, clears his throat ostentatiously and leans back in his chair until it creaks.

Dean watches him for a moment, unimpressed. He’s weathered better tantrums from Sam - and from Bobby, come to think of it; he doesn’t think the sulking coroner has a shotgun stashed anywhere in his battered steel desk, and that was always a risk with Bobby. So he’s willing to keep asking questions until the answers get coughed up, but if they’re sitting on a couple of fresh bodies, maybe he’s telling the truth about not knowing who’s lying on his table. 

On the other hand, _Dean_ can figure that part out on his own. “Okay then. I’ll check back later, give you a number where you can fax the vic’s ID and the preliminary report.” As Dr. Marx’s head swings up, Dean forces a laugh and puts up his hands. “Kidding! But before I go, can you run me a printout of the scene report?”

By way of an answer, Dr. Marx swivels his chair so that he’s facing Dean and flips him a Sharpie. “Drive out there yourself and write it on your hand – my printer’s broken.” He reels off an address and turns back to his computer.

Rolling his eyes, Dean taps it into his phone. Still, there’s no use pissing off the old coot too hard; if he’s right, whatever killed this guy isn’t quite ready to find another hobby. And that will mean another visit sometime soon. “Thanks, Doc,” he says, trying to put a little Sam into his voice, and there’s a sigh from the chair. 

“You can leave my pen with the receptionist. And Agent Jackson? Go easy on the wife. From what my notes say, she kept insisting it wasn’t her husband, and I hope that means they’ve gotten someone to slip her a mickey.”

“A mickey?” Who says _mickey_ anymore? 

Dr. Marx waves a large gray-furred hand in Dean’s direction. “Whatever. She may be too looped to talk, is all I’m saying.”

*

By the time he finds the street, out in a half-deserted suburb east of the city, Dean’s listened to all of _Physical Graffiti_. As it loops around a second time he slows down, squinting onto small shadowed front porches to read the numbers on the houses, and finally pops the tape out and drops it onto the floor. Sam would bitch, he thinks, or maybe not: it’s not easy to find cassette tapes these days, and Sam’s gotta be tired of – Dean stops, more than slightly annoyed at the direction his thoughts have taken. Fucking Sam, walking off _again_ as if him leaving had ever solved anything. Dean had taken the Vegas hunt when Bobby called, figuring Vegas was the last place he’d run into either Sam or the Leviathans, but if he’s honest with himself, he’s a little annoyed, too, that he’s right about that part.

Well, annoyed that Sam’s not here, not annoyed about – he shakes his head. Christ, he’s even starting to _sound_ like Sam in his own fucking head. He pulls up in front of a little sandy-colored house, checks the house number against the one in his phone and climbs out into a wall of heat.

“Hot enough for ya?” he says to no one in particular and marches purposefully up the cracked sidewalk to the front door. When he presses the doorbell there’s a racket of chimes and small dogs, and out of the corner of his eye he sees the curtain to what’s probably the living room window twitch down, as if someone had been watching him approach the door. He steps back, holds up Special Agent Jackson’s badge, and waits. 

The woman who answers the door is young, way younger than Dean would have expected from the age of the guy in the drawer at the coroner’s. The granddaughter, maybe, he thinks, and puts on Sam’s best sympathy face.

“Agent Jackson, FBI.” He folds the badge back into his pocket. “Mind if I come in, ask a few questions?”

There’s a loud wail from somewhere behind the woman and she nods hurriedly, vanishing toward the back of the house. Dean pulls the door closed behind him and ducks to the right, curious about the curtains he’d seen moving.

The room he walks into is bigger than he thought it would be, or maybe it’s just so full of stuff it’s warped the normal relationship between space and volume. Two battered recliners take up most of the far wall while a television the size of a small movie screen obscures most of the front window. The floor is awash in toys, heaps of fake fur and a disturbing number of headless torsos obscuring the carpet. 

Dean shakes his head and backs out carefully. Behind him, there’s a gurgling noise, and as he whips around he sees the woman who’d answered the door is now sporting a small, damp-looking child.

“This is Vern,” she says flatly. “You find out what happened to his daddy yet?”

Dean blinks. That is just a place he doesn’t want to – “His daddy?” he says carefully.

“Yeah,” she says. “He hasn’t come home since yesterday. I was hopin’ your guys had found him.” The baby gives Dean a gummy smile and then buries his face in his mother’s arm.

“Er –“ Did he get the address wrong? 

“You ain’t here about Vern Senior, are you?” She hitches the baby higher on her hip and sighs. “You’re here about the dead guy.” 

Dean blinks at her again. “You found a dead guy? Where?”

She gives him a disgusted look. “Don’t you guys talk to each other? In my bed, this morning when I got off shift.” She picks her way down the hall, coming to a stop in front of a door still sporting crime scene tape. “In there. Had to put the baby to sleep on the couch, and Vern Senior still ain’t back.”

The hallway smells like sour milk and cigarettes, and maybe she reads something in his face or maybe the baby’s starting to bite, because she pushes past him abruptly and leads him into a tiny kitchen. 

“Sit,” she says, and plops Little Vern into a playpen. He starts to wail and she reaches into the fridge, pulls out a bottle filled with an amber liquid Dean hopes is apple juice and puts it into his grasping hands. 

Dean sits. 

“You want anything?” 

“No thanks.”

She pours herself a cup of coffee, heaps a spoonful of sugar into it and sits herself down. Close up, her face is lined and tired, older than he’d thought at first but still nowhere close to the age of the body he’d seen. “What’s your name?” he says gently, and she starts to cry.

Two cups of coffee and one bottle of, yes, apple juice later, he’s got the story. Vern O’Gara, twenty-nine years old and a line cook at one of the downtown casinos, left for work the day before the same time he always did, at six in the morning. His wife, Ellie, watched the baby all day and then dropped him off at her mother’s before leaving for her shift at the same casino; Vern picked up Little Vern and brought him home, and everything was the same as it had been for two fucking years ever since Little Vern was fucking _born_ , up until the moment Ellie got home to find an old dead stranger in her bed and no sign of Vern.

“Um,” Dean says at the end of this, wishing Sam was here to make soothing noises or whatever, and then asks the questions she’s expecting him to ask. No, the door was locked and there was no sign of a break-in; no, she and Vern ain’t been fighting, no more than normal; and no, she had no idea who the dead geezer was, none of her family made it much past sixty and he was at least a hundred.

Dean whistles, and she nods vigorously. “Smelled like old guy and everything.”

Dean glances around the room. The window over the kitchen sink shows him an equally-small backyard surrounded by a chain-link fence, and he watches idly as an orange cat picks its way along the top of There’s a flurry of barking as a small dog dashes out from its place on the covered patio and flings itself at the fence. The cat, unconcerned, continues its circuit of the yard. Somehow, he’s not sure why, Dean can sympathize with both of them.

The sound of chair legs scraping on the linoleum pulls his attention back to Ellie. As he looks up, she puts something down on the table in front of him. It’s a ceramic frame, cheerful bunnies scampering around a photo of two smiling people. He peers at it more closely. The woman is a younger version of Ellie, all blond curls and overflowing cleavage, the baby in her arms no more than a couple of months old. Next to her, a tall man with crewcut hair and a painful-looking sunburn on his nose is smiling, a bit awkwardly.

“That’s Vern,” Ellie says. “Couple years ago, of course, but he ain’t changed much.”

Dean tries and fails to map the face onto the one he’d seen earlier. “Do you have a more recent picture?”

She bites her lip, then stands up and crosses over to the counter by the door, where a bright yellow bag is sitting. “Hang on – I got something real recent.” She fishes around in it for a moment and pulls out a piece of paper. “Here!” she says, giving him an expectant look.

He glances down. On the paper is a black marker drawing, one of those things they sell to tourists at carnivals. Dean still has one he’d paid someone to do of Sam, years ago when the kid was just starting to grow into his height, all knees and elbows and long sharp features. He smoothes a hand over the drawing and looks from it to the photo. 

Even in the exaggerated lines of the sketch he can see that Vern had grown his hair out a little and filled out a lot. The artist had captured a neck that went straight from ears to shoulders and, somehow, a hint of the same awkward look he’d worn in the photo. Dean taps the faint lines sketched underneath Vern’s lower lip.

“Growing a beard, huh?”

Ellie blushes. “Only on his days off – casino won’t let you wear them.”

“When was this done?”

She picks it up and turns it over. “Thursday, couple days ago. So you see, Agent Jackson, this here’s my Vern. That old guy – I hope you figure out who he is, ‘cause someone’s gotta be worried about him.” 

On cue, Little Vern starts to cry, and with a firm glance toward the front of the house, Ellie O’Gara picks up her son. Dean pushes back from the table.

“Thanks for your time, ma’am. I’ll see myself out.” He’s got another half-dozen questions, but they’re nothing she can answer. He snaps a picture of the drawing and one of the photo, then the two side by side. He needs to talk to Bobby and to Dr. Marx, and sometime today, to Sheppard. 

But first, he needs some lunch. And a shower.

*

Back in his motel room, he paces around for a while. The room’s got an odd underwater feel to it, the recessed lighting in the pale green ceiling reflecting off turquoise walls like the pool lights at the Blue Bunny. He’s got a couple of clippings pinned up but somehow, without Sam’s neat printing telling him what he’s looking at, when he stares at them the already-grainy shots devolve further until the bodies in them morph into gigantic popcorn hulls. Irritated all over again, he unlaces his boots and shucks his clothes, and climbs into the shower.

Twenty minutes later, Dean’s cleaner than he’s been in days. He shuts the water off and climbs out of the tub, groping for a towel and nearly losing his footing on the slick wet tile floor. Staring down at his bright pink feet, he wiggles his long toes in the water, and then bolts out of the bathroom to stare again at the wall. 

This time he sees what he missed the first time: the corpses still look like popcorn hulls, the bodies not just old but curled into tight husks as if to hold onto whatever got sucked out of them. Dr. Marx’s latest patient, though, had looked almost happy, as if he’d gone to sleep dreaming of flappers and bathtub gin and just hadn’t woken up.

_Two_ cases, then, both of them fucking creepy. What the hell has Bobby gotten him into, he wonders, and gropes his own ass looking for his phone before he remembers he isn’t wearing his pants.

“Bobby,” he says a few minutes later, once the phone, his jeans and the thin scratchy towel are all back in their rightful places. In the towel’s case, that means a damp heap under the bathroom sink, along with all the water that slid past the plastic curtain and gave Dean the first bona-fide revelation he’s had in weeks. “I think I got two separate things going on here. For what it’s worth, neither of ‘em are vampires.”

“Didn’t think it was.” Bobby’s voice rumbles down the line, a weirdly reassuring sound for something accompanied by the unmistakable noise of someone sharpening a _serious_ blade. Dean tucks the phone into his shoulder and pulls open the room’s tiny fridge. He’s pretty sure he’d left a – yeah, there it is. “Dean!”

“Sorry.” He twists the cap off on the beer. “Look, Bobby, you ever heard of something that ages people? You know, makes them old first, then kills them?”

The noise that greets this question would have Dean reaching for the holy water if he didn’t already know its source. As it is, he’s halfway through his beer before Bobby wheezes himself to a stop.

“Son, that’s priceless,” Bobby says finally, laughter still creeping through the connection. “Took ten years off.”

“Yeah, yeah. Seriously, though, Bobby…”

“You got any other cases?”

Dean squints at Sheppard’s victims, at the horror scraped into their faces. “Dunno. The thing I was tracking got, um, blown up, but I –“

“Blown up?” Bobby says sharply.

“Long story, most of which I don’t actually know.” Dean slugs back the rest of his beer. “But it’s pretty much toast, far as I can tell. Problem is, another corpse turned up this morning.”

“Door Number Two?”

“Door Number Two, yep.” Dean sketches in the details, managing to skip the part about his bathtime revelation. 

“You got any ideas?”

Dean makes a frustrated noise, and Bobby snorts. “Used to having Sam do this shit, aren’t you?” Dean doesn’t say anything, and Bobby continues, his voice a hair softer. “Look, Dean, what you need to do is check with the homeless shelters, see if anyone’s disappeared or if they’ve had older folks turning up dead. I don’t know what you’ve got, but maybe it’s been there for a while, killing the people who are gonna end up in Potter’s Field anyways.” 

It’s not a bad idea, and yeah, Bobby’s right, he _is_ used to having Sam do this shit, especially the old newspapers and homeless shelters part. _Damn it._ He clears his throat, not sure what the sudden lump in it is from, and growls at Bobby, “Where the hell is Potter’s Field? Only thing I can find here are casinos and mountains.”

There’s a dry laugh on the other end of the phone. “Google it, son. I’m sure your brother’ll be back any day now, help you with that stuff.” With a click, Bobby’s gone.

Dean glares at his phone. Great, more research.

~*~  


Two days later, he’s talked to what feels like every do-gooder, sober living counselor and Dr. Drew wannabe in greater Las Vegas. He’s been offered pamphlets, business cards, phone numbers scribbled on bits of paper and at least two blow jobs, none of which he takes. He’s also learned that yeah, Bobby was right, there’ve been an unusual number of elderly drunks turning up dead in the last few months. 

On the other hand, Vegas is a city with a lot on its mind, and nobody much notices when _dead drunk_ turns into just plain _dead_ unless the corpse shows up in a high-end hotel. So far, all of these guys have been found in tents and alleyways, not on thousand-count sheets.

The Morning Mission is the last place on his list. He wants nothing more than a beer or twelve and a shower, but he pulls open its filthy door and heads for the desk. “Why morning?” he asks the young man sitting there.

He looks up, pulling a tiny headphone out of one pierced ear. “What?” His voice is surprisingly deep and carries a Texas twang, incongruous in the close stale air of the room. It’s furnished with the same cast-off vinyl sofas he’s been looking at for the last two days, and smells the same, too: disinfectant and sweat and cigarette smoke and, somewhere underneath it all, a breath of sulphur. Or maybe that’s just the remains of lunch, Dean’s not sure. 

He lifts an eyebrow. “ _Morning_. Why is it the _Morning Mission_?”

“Dude, it’s Vegas. Casinos are open all night. People need someplace to come once security bounces ‘em.”

“Huh.” Dean glances around. There’s a half dozen men clustered around a television in one corner of the room. Most of them are dressed in jeans, t-shirts, and a variety of ancient ballcaps. More weapons and he’d think he was at a hunter’s reunion. He coughs into his hand and one of the men looks up, scowling. Dean grins and turns back to the desk. “Security lets these guys in at all?”

“Not up on the Strip, no. Some of the places downtown – hey, money’s all the same, you know?”

“Yeah, no shit.” 

The kid smiles, a quick flash of crooked teeth, and picks up his earbud. “Sir? You need a bed for the night, try down the street at the Pontiac if you’re not the praying kind. We’ll be open again at 6am. Anything you need, Marge can probably fix you up.”

_Sir_? Bed for the night?

Dean glances down at himself, noting jeans, boots, a formerly white t-shirt under a ratty overshirt, and then back over to the men around the TV. He knows he hasn’t shaved since before he dragged Sheppard out of the desert, and – yeah. 

Shit. 

He’s been mistaken for a lot of things. _Homeless_ has never been one of them. 

“S’okay, I got a room,” he says. “Thanks, though. Look –“ he lifts his chin toward the TV, where, from the yelling, the men are watching Jerry Springer. “You ever get any young guys through here, guys your age?”

The kid gives him a wary look, and Dean, reluctantly, pulls out his badge. “Special Agent Jackson. I’m looking into a missing person case, guy in his mid-twenties, kind of heavy-set…” He lets his voice trail off and pockets the badge. 

“Guys in their twenties, not so much, no. That age, you got somewhere to go.” He bites his lip, looks around, and leans toward Dean. “Kids, though, they come in sometimes looking for a place to crash for a couple hours.”

Dean leans forward and drops his voice. “You let them?”

“Long as they’re eighteen, yeah.” He winks elaborately, the rings in his left eyebrow twitching in unison. “Lately, though – lately I been seeing a bunch of new faces. Like the old ones have disappeared, moved on, gone home.”

“Disappeared?”

Without answering, he reaches for a remote control and turns of the television. Six grizzled faces swivel toward her. “Manana, dudes,” he says cheerfully, and turns back to Dean. “Anyways, if you’ve got a room already, that’s cool, we’ll see you in the morning. Six am, like I just said.” 

His voice is pitched to carry, and one by one, the men leave the sanctuary of their cracked vinyl chairs and shuffle toward a bank of lockers on the far wall. Belongings hoisted over shoulders, they file out more or less silently. Once they’re gone, the kid shuts his computer down and climbs off the stool to shut off the overhead lights. Without the hiss of the old fluorescent fixtures, the room is eerily silent. 

Dean is torn between a sudden urge to be anywhere else and the sense that he’s on the verge of asking the right question, after two days straight of asking the wrong ones. “Of course, some of those kids may not have wanted to leave. You ever talk to any of them after they got where they were going?”

He cocks his head thoughtfully. The evening light, slanting into the doorway, picks out faint lines around his mouth and a hard look in his eyes. Not a kid, then, even if he couldn’t have been more than twenty-one, twenty-two.

“Nope. Who knows why anyone leaves Las Vegas, you know?” Shutting the door behind Dean, he locks it firmly and pulls a steel gate across its grubby expanse of glass, then disappears into the shadows in the back of the room.

Outside on the sidewalk the wind has picked up and the temperature is dropping. Dean sucks in a big breath of dry cool air and lets it out. For all that he’s spent his life in crappy motels, at least he checked out of them having saved someone. The shelters, though – they’re better than the streets, and in their way they gank even more demons than hunters do, but _holy shit_ if he never has to walk into another one it will be too soon. 

Sam would tell him it’s because of Dad, because the shelters were the only line, it seemed, that Dad wouldn’t cross when they were kids. 

But hey, Sam’s not here.

 

On his way out of town he rolls down the window and slows the GTO’s big engine to a pace somewhere between creep and crawl. Heading south, the streets fill fast as the heat of the day disappears and the neon signs start appearing, bigger and brighter as he gets closer to downtown. But a block before the overpass that’ll put him onto the freeway, he pulls a quick U-turn. 

This time through, he watches the faces. Most of the men are Dean’s age or a older, not a lot of young guys, not a lot of women – and not a lot of old guys, either. He thinks back to what the kid at the Morning Mission had said, that it seemed like more than a few of the familiar faces had disappeared, and wonders briefly if the heat hasn’t made him stupid as well as cranky.

Thing is, they call these guys _transients_ for a reason. A lot of missions, Dean knows, don’t keep more than a head count of their clientele. But it’s probably not a coincidence that the number of young guys moving on is somewhere close to the number of old guys showing up dead. Question is, how close? Fortunately, Dean has a pretty good idea how to get his hands on those records.

Reaching into his back pocket, he pulls out his phone. When the voice on the other end answers with a terse “Sheppard,” sounding a hell of a lot better than it had two days ago, Dean swings around the block and heads south again, this time aiming for the highway.

“It’s Jackson. Or rather, fuck that, it’s Dean. You feeling up to company?”

“Oh, thank God,” Sheppard replies. “The _Dangerous Catch_ marathon doesn’t start for another two hours.”

“Asshole,” Dean says, smiling around the word. “But you’re gonna wish you didn’t say that. I got a project for you, Detective.”

~*~  


Back at the Blue Bunny, Dean reaches for the bag of tacos he’d snagged before getting on the road to Pahrump. The tacos – and the six-pack of PBR, fuck Sheppard if he has fancier tastes – can’t possibly be on the doc’s list of approved gunshot-victim foods, but Dean figures anyone who’s been waiting for a TV show about crab fishing to start is likely to be hungry as well as bored. 

He flips his phone open. “Hey, you still in Doc Emmagan’s spare room?”

“Nope,” Sheppard says. “Last room on the left as you walk toward the pool. Door’s unlocked.”

The road is dark, barely enough moonlight to show him the path separating the trailers from the house. The trailers themselves are dark, and even the house seems to be deserted –Sheppard’s room is the only one that’s got its light on. He pads across the concrete as the wind spins trash into the empty pool.

“Sheppard, hey, it’s me.” 

“It’s open.” 

Dean pushes the sliding glass door open and elbows his way through the vertical blinds. “Did everybody but you win the lottery? Where the hell is everyone?” 

The room Sheppard’s in is bigger than the doc’s spare bedroom, painted a lush if peeling purple. John Sheppard is lying in the middle of a double bed, propped up on a stack of pillows and wearing a disgruntled expression. The frown changes to a grin when Dean produces the six-pack, popping the top before handing a can to Sheppard. “Seriously, where are they?”

“Sunday’s apparently a day of rest at the Blue Bunny. So everyone’s either sleeping or at a casino. Are those tacos?” he adds, eyes settling on the bag Dean dropped at the foot of the bed.

Dean picks it up and brandishes it in Sheppard’s direction. “Hasn’t the doc been feeding you?” 

“Not on carne asada from Gilberto’s.” Moving carefully, he picks the taco up by its paper wrapper, but after three bites, Dean moves in to save the sheets from a terminal attack of taco drippings.

“Here, lemme put that in a doggie bag for you.”

“I don’t have a dog.”

“I’m pretty sure dogs hate hot sauce anyways,” Dean says, putting the half-eaten taco back on the nightstand and grabbing one for himself. It’s _awesome_ , just like the woman at the gas station he’d stopped at promised, sweet and spicy and deeply, profoundly greasy. He moans around it happily.

There’s a sudden snort from the bed and Dean looks up, grinning. “Seriously, best thing since –“

“Yeah, yeah, sliced bread.” Sheppard is back to looking aggrieved.

Dean wonders if it’s the drugs wearing off or if there’s something else putting the frown between his eyes. “What?” 

“How did you know I was a cop? Did you search my car?” 

Dean shakes his head and leans forward in the chair. “We had this conversation three days ago,” he points out. “Besides, you want to stay undercover, you shouldn’t let reporters take your picture.” 

Sheppard’s eyes darken. After a moment, though, he relaxes, and Dean leans back in his chair and pops the top on a can of beer. He drains half of it, relishing the thin sharp flavor. Pointing the can at Sheppard once it’s empty, he adds, “Now, about that project….”

Sheppard picks up the remote, looking suddenly indecisive. Dean, annoyed, peels himself off the vinyl seat of the chair and glares down at the man in the bed. Fuck. He should know better - there’s no point to asking anybody but another hunter for help, and even then it’s crap shoot. Still, he’s talking to a guy who’d run a suicide mission armed with nothing more than a semi-automatic and who the United States fucking Air Force then left to die. If he doesn’t have a guilt button the size of Sam’s, Dean will give up hunting for – he doesn’t really know what, come to think of it, and scowls fiercely at Sheppard.

“Yeah,” he says. “I searched your car. You know, right after I dragged your gunshot ass out of the desert and delivered it to a doctor?” Reaching over, he pulls the remote out of Sheppard’s hand. “So what’s it gonna be? Crab fishing or catching more bad guys?” 

Sheppard watches him for a few moments, the blue light from the TV screen playing over his pale skin under its mat of black hair. Dude needs a shave, Dean thinks irrelevantly, and touches the volume switch. The sound of people yelling over the rumble of heavy diesel engines fills the room. 

“Turn it off,” Sheppard says finally, and moving slowly, swings his legs over the side of the bed. He’s wearing his jeans, the waistband loose on his narrow hips, and his left arm is in a sling. Above it, his shoulder is bruised purple, but the skin looks healthy and not inflamed. 

As Dean watches, he puts his right hand on the nightstand and, gritting his teeth, starts to lever himself to his feet. 

Dean shuts the TV off and puts the remote down. “Where are you going?”

Sheppard rolls his eyes. “There’s a police scanner in the trunk of my car. You didn’t find it, or you wouldn’t be here asking for my help.”

Dean laughs, and crossing the small room, pushes Sheppard back down onto the bed. When Sheppard frowns at him, he says mildly, “Shoes, genius. Always easier to put ‘em on if you’re sitting down.”

As it turns out, someone’s put his boots and a more or less clean shirt into the room’s narrow closet, so Dean’s able to get him dressed with a minimum of fuss. When he’s done, though, Sheppard’s white-lipped and sweating.

“You sure about this?” He’d lost the same fight with Sammy a dozen or so times, so he’s not all that surprised when Sheppard just grimaces and heads for the door.

“You can fill me in on the way,” Sheppard says. “Only thing is, I turned in my badge before I left Vegas. So whatever we’re about to do is technically illegal.”

“Awesome,” Dean says. “Why did I think a trip to Vegas would be anything out of the ordinary?”

*

The scanner is exactly where Sheppard tells him it will be, stashed in a compartment under the spare tire. Dean shakes his head as he snaps the plate back into place and drops the spare tire in over it – stupid not to have checked there, but he hadn’t really been looking for more than weapons and maybe a clue as to who Sheppard was that night. 

Slamming the trunk, he slides back into the car, giving the scanner a curious glance as he pulls the door closed. “Anything else you got tucked away in there? Grenade launcher? Unmanned drone, maybe?”

Sheppard gives him a sharp look. “Cop, remember?”

“Dude, I am not the one who nearly got blown up by a couple of F-15s. And come to think of it, why aren’t the men in black looking for you?”

“They weren’t F-15s,” Sheppard says.

“Not my actual question.” 

There’s no answer, so Dean twists the key in the ignition and pulls back out onto the road. This time, he heads east, toward the far-off lights of Las Vegas. 

Finally, Sheppard says quietly, “They will be. So why don’t you tell me about your case before they find me.”

It doesn’t take long – Dean’s still not sure it’s anything more than what it looks like on the surface, somebody breaking in to check for gold chains and cash and finding their number’s up instead. Or if the missing kids from Skid Row are anything more than transient populations rolling over. “Place like Vegas – you must get runaways from all over the country,” he says, thinking about the time he’d run Sam to ground in Flagstaff.

“Yeah, especially this time of year. School’s out, weather’s warm enough so they don’t freeze to death hitchhiking.” There’s something in Sheppard’s tone that makes Dean think that he must have come here in search of something, too, but he doesn’t ask, and the tires eat a few more miles of empty road before he opens his mouth again. “Did Dr. Marx say anything about cause of death?” 

“Nope. Said he’d call when he did.” 

“Uh-huh.” And then, sounding overly casual, he adds, “Did you see anything… out of the ordinary when you were there?”

Dean keeps his hands on the wheel. “Would you believe me if I said yes?” Another mile disappears, and he risks a glance over at his passenger. Sheppard’s watching the mountains under their canopy of stars, a muscle jumping in his jaw and his right hand fisted into his jeans. Without acknowledging Dean’s look, he nods tightly. 

_Gotcha_. Dean’s positive Sheppard knows exactly what it was that tried to kill him and just how human it wasn’t. Question is, though, how much else does he know?

*

The next morning he gets coffee and something that resembles breakfast from the lobby vending machines and walks back into the room just as Sheppard manages to put both feet onto the carpet.

“Looking good!” Dean grins and drops the crackers into his lap. “I hope you like sugar in your coffee.” 

“Thanks,” Sheppard says, picking up the crackers and tearing the bag open with his teeth. “What time is it?”

“Time to go get a real breakfast. How soon before we can get that radio fired up?” 

“Anytime. Do you know what you’re hoping to hear?”

“Number One on the hit parade would be an APB based on fingerprint evidence from the stiff yesterday.” Dean shoves a miniature donut into his mouth and chews for a moment. “Then we could all go home. Number Two would be another case, only this time we’d get to the crime scene while it still was a crime scene. Then you –“ he points a second donut at Sheppard – “could tell me if it looked like your guy did the killing.”

Sheppard sets his cup down and frowns at it. 

Dean notes the move. “Hmm, not your idea of fun? Number Three would be, it’s not your guy but whoever it was leaves enough crap behind it that I can figure out where they are.” No point telling Sheppard any more than he actually needs to, not before he’s sure of what he’s dealing with. He bites off half the donut, smiling at Sheppard through the powdered sugar. “Now, you gonna tell me why that thing has you so spooked?” 

Sheppard wipes his fingers on the bedspread and stands up. After a couple of deep breaths, he starts walking toward the bathroom, not stopping until he’s got a solid grip on its doorframe. “No,” he says clearly. “I am going to take a leak and a shower, in that order. Then I’m going to call Teyla and we’re going to get breakfast, I don’t care where. Then, _maybe_ I’ll tell you what you were chasing. But not until I’ve had a cup of coffee that doesn’t taste like ass.” 

“You don’t want your coffee?” 

Shaking his head, Sheppard steps into the room’s tiny bathroom, closing the door firmly behind him. Dean addresses himself to his own cup. Ass or not, at least the stuff’s _hot_.

What seems like a very long time later, Sheppard walks out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam and a too-small towel, carrying his jeans. His hair is sticking up in a thousand directions and he looks faintly embarrassed. When he turns around, Dean lets his eyes travel the length of Sheppard’s lean frame, noting more muscles than he’d expected under a lot of dark hair. 

A _lot_ of dark hair.

Dean bites his lip to keep the grin off his own face. “Feeling better?”

“You have no fucking idea,” Sheppard says forcefully. “Only thing better would be shaving.”

“Shaving?” 

“I feel like a yeti. Still can’t raise my arms enough to do it myself.” He glances down at the towel around his waist, flushing again. “You wouldn’t happen to have a spare pair of shorts, would you? I’ll replace them.”

“Shit, no.” He hasn’t done laundry in way too long, not that he’s got much in the way of spare anything these days. “We can stop somewhere, though.” 

Sheppard gives him a long amused look before shrugging and turning back toward the bathroom. “Commando’s good.” He pulls the door shut behind him, and Dean’s pretty sure it’s only his imagination that feeds him the sound of a damp towel hitting the floor. 

Throat suddenly dry, he swallows the rest of his coffee, gathers up the file he’s been paging through and shoves it, along with Sheppard’s radio, into a duffle. When Sheppard sticks his head out of the room, a few minutes later, he’s got everything stowed in the back seat of the car and is drumming his fingers on the roof. 

Sheppard drops his sunglasses down over his eyes. “What’s the plan?” He looks healthier than he had the night before, although that might be the fact that he’s dressed and vertical for the first time in days. 

“Breakfast, followed by you figuring out if we’re looking at a killer or just a bunch of dead homeless guys.”

“There’s an IHOP a couple miles down.” He chews thoughtfully on his lip for a moment, then adds, “I thought you said the last vic had a home? In cop school, they teach you to look for patterns.”

“Yep,” Dean says, pulling out onto the road. There’s no traffic, just a couple of pickups towing horse trailers and the occasional minivan. Behind him, the motel’s parking lot is empty too. Where’d everybody go, he wonders, thinking of the half-built and abandoned housing developments he’s been driving by for the last week. He punches the gas, not sure if it’s the landscape, the half-assed hunt or Sam’s absence that’s got him feeling twitchy. Answers, he thinks. He needs _answers_. Reaching into the back, he fishes out Sheppard’s scanner and drops it into his lap. “School I went to, they teach you the same thing.” 

~*~  


“More coffee, honey?” The waitress, a middle-aged woman with thick-soled shoes and a tired smile, waves a pot at Dean. 

He glances at Sheppard and shakes his head. “Just the check, thanks.”

Pulling a pad out of her pocket, she scribbles something on it and rips off the top page. “Register’s up at the front.” 

Sheppard pushes the eggs he’s barely touched off to one side. “Did you bring your computer?”

Dean forks the last chunk of syrup-soaked pancake into his mouth and opens the laptop he’d bought. Sheppard pulls the computer across the table. “Tell me again, what is it you’re looking for?”

Dean’s been thinking about this. _More cases_ , Bobby had said. “John Does, really old ones, especially cases where they weren’t able to make a positive ID.”

“Time frame?”

Dean shrugs. “Last year or so? I don’t want to be wading through files until _I’m_ old and unidentifiable.”

Sheppard taps at the keyboard, his movements awkward. Finally he stops, flexing his hand carefully, eyes on the screen. “Okay. Here’s a list going back three years.” He turns the computer back around and Dean leans forward, peering at the neat columns on the screen.

“Holy shit,” he murmurs. “That’s a lot of bodies.”

“Yeah.” Sheppard puts his hand out, then looks at Dean. “You said you’d been up on Skid Row yesterday. Did you drive around a bit, get a feel for the people?”

“Not a lot of hundred and twenty five year olds.”

Sheppard snorts. “Not even close. I think you’ve got your pattern here.”

“Yeah, but why kill old people?” Nothing dines exclusively on the ancient, not when there’s another option. And there’d been plenty of other meal choices on Skid Row, if what he’s hunting is in town for the cuisine. Which means -- “Huh- maybe that old corpse really was Vern.”

“Vern?”

Before Dean can answer, though, both his phone and the scanner go off simultaneously. He can’t answer both devices, so he shoves the scanner across the table and flips open his phone. Before he can even say “Jackson,” he’s being snapped at.

“I said, _where’s John_?” There’s more than steel in her voice this time. Dean imagines some sort of space age metal, lightweight and impermeable.

“Still working on his coffee, Doc.” Sheppard glances up from fiddling at the scanner and frowns. “Wanna say hi?”

He passes the phone across the table and sits back, smiling. Sheppard pointedly turns away, so Dean reaches for the scanner. Somehow, Sheppard’s managed to set it to give a text readout of whatever crime-fighting wizardry it’s channeling, so he stares at the crawl until Sheppard snaps the phone closed and puts it gingerly on the table.

“Mom yell at you for staying out past your bedtime?”

“Fuck me,” Sheppard says, and puts his head back against the booth. “Next time you’re shot, don’t let anyone feed you Mexican food.”

“She found the tacos.”

“And the empty beer cans.”

“At least I grabbed the full ones.” Sheppard gives him a look that reminds him startlingly of Sam, and Dean hastily changes the subject. “So, is there any way of just getting the calls you’re interested in on this thing? Like, I’m pretty sure traffic stops and drunk-and-disorderly calls aren’t what we need to go chasing.”

“Lemme see.”

This time, it takes a little more fiddling, but finally Sheppard looks up with a grin on his narrow face. “Got it. Robbery-Homicide channel.” The grin slips away, replaced by something Dean is intimately familiar with: the look of a man an hour or so past his last dose of pain pills. 

He slips his phone into his pocket and, dropping cash onto the table, slides out of the booth. “Come on, Columbo, let’s get you horizontal again, shall we?” 

Outside, the heat hits them like a living weight, bright and merciless. Sheppard flinches and swears under his breath, but once Dean’s got him stowed in the car along with the electronics, he points toward the shimmering mirage that might be a city, there at the end of the highway. Dean squints at it through his shades, then focuses back on the road in front of them.

“Motel’s back the other way,” he points out. “Thought you needed to lie down?”

“My apartment’s in Vegas. I wouldn’t mind picking up a few things, as long as I’m up.” He fumbles in his pocket, pulling out a small plastic case. “Open this for me, please?”

Den snaps it open and drops two capsules into Sheppard’s palm. Sheppard dry-swallows them and leans back. “If anything comes up on the scanner, we’ll be that much closer. Besides, I can call Dr. Marx from my phone instead of yours.”

Dean snorts.”You think he’d notice?”

That gets him a look of amused pity. “Gave you the line about the broken printer, did he?”

Dean, suddenly needing something to do with his hands, starts to back out of the restaurant’s now-crowded parking lot. 

“Don’t worry, everyone falls for it. He may look like Gummo but he’s sharp. Just don’t forget that, you’ll be okay.” Sheppard settles himself against the window. “Get on I-15 going north. Wake me up when we pass the airport.” A moment later, his breathing settles into the slow rhythm of sleep. 

He hasn’t said anything about a partner, but he’s obviously used to working with someone, Dean thinks – he gets the same sense from Sheppard that he does from Bobby once in a while, the feeling that he’s used to having the space next to him filled, even if it was a long time ago. And yeah, Dean knows _exactly_ what that feels like. When Sam’s not there the whole weight of the air feels wrong, like he’s some kind of freaking _windbreak_ or something. 

Sammy: interchangeable with a whole bunch of trees. Dean snorts, loud enough to surprise a twitch out of Sheppard. “Hey, hey,” he says, and Sheppard settles back into the corner. Dean watches him for a second before the road pulls him back. He can’t imagine sleeping through anyone’s driving except Sam’s, not anymore. Bemused, trying not to think about Sam, what he’s doing, if he’s hunting or just gone to ground, he flips the scanner to _voice_ and drives.

*

He pokes Sheppard when the first sign for McCarran appears on the highway. Sheppard jerks awake, glancing out the window before slumping back against the seat. “Couple more exits, then get off at the first one for North Las Vegas.”

The neighborhood turns out to be a couple steps up from nearby Skid Row, but they’re small steps: the houses are crayon-colored boxes, their hard little yards home to appliances and children’s toys slowly crumbling in the sun. Further in, the houses are replaced by apartment buildings surrounded by chain link fences. 

“Make a left at the next light. It’s a big blue building, middle of the block,” Sheppard says.

Dean swings left through the intersection and then almost stops dead before his brain catches up. The first thing he sees is a pair of black SUVs that look like they each cost more than most of the ratty bungalows he’s been driving past. Two men in suits stand between the SUVs and a big blue building, and someone in a white jumpsuit is walking toward them carrying a box.

“Friends of yours?” He jerks his chin in their direction, taking his foot off the brake. He's unsurprised when Sheppard glances up and then slowly, carefully, slides down until he’s nearly horizontal.

“Drive,” he hisses, voice low as if the SUVs are equipped with mics that can pick up his words over the vibration of the GTO’s engine block. Of course, for all Dean knows, they are.

“No shit.” Dean accelerates evenly once the oversized pickup to his right is through the light. Its badly-muffled engine is loud enough to hide behind until Sheppard points him down a street that puts them onto a busy commercial strip. He turns into the parking lot of an auto parts store and circles around until he’s as sure as he can be that they weren’t followed, then pulls into a yellow zone back by the loading dock and turns to Sheppard.

“Talk,” he says tightly, but before Sheppard can open his mouth, the scanner erupts with a loud burst of static and a rapid-fire code.

“Fuck,” Sheppard says, and turns the volume up as the voice reads out an address. “Go, go – highway’s off to the left, I’ll explain in a sec.”

Dean gives him a long look but Sheppard is oblivious, his attention fixed on the scanner. More voices are coming through, numbers Dean doesn’t quite catch making Sheppard nod until he figures out that Dean still hasn’t moved. 

“ _Go_ , damn it – unless you’ve just been blowing smoke up my ass this whole time?”

Dean goes.

*

This time, the house is bigger, its front yard studded with spiky-looking trees. Its neighbors, though, look like their owners abandoned them sometime in the last four years, their stucco fronts peeling and the cacti in front of them shriveled and grey. A sign in front of the one on the left says “Bank Repo” in big red letters, while the one on the right seems to have given up on even that slim chance of redemption.

Dean pulls up behind a knot of cop cars and glances at his passenger. Sheppard’s eyes are invisible behind his aviators, and Dean wonders if it’s his shoulder or his former colleagues making the muscle twitch in his jaw. He switches off the ignition and swings his door open. The staccato haze of police radios filters in, and Sheppard switches off the scanner before shoving it under the seat.

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” he says when Dean lifts an eyebrow at the action. “Hey, I always contributed to the coffee fund, you know?”

Dean grunts. The air is still and so dry it rasps in his throat. Sheppard falls into step beside him, moving slowly, and Dean pulls him to a stop before they get to the first uniform. 

“You know any of these guys?” 

Sheppard shakes his head. “Used to work with the dark-haired woman, over on the left.” He jerks his chin toward a woman in plainclothes leaning against an unmarked sedan, her attention split between the scene and her cell phone. “Like I said, I left the badge on my lieutenant’s desk a few days back.”

“Maybe it’s still there?” 

“Not fucking likely.” He looks up. One of the uniformed officers is approaching them, confusion written all over his dark features. 

“Detective Sheppard?” the young man says, and Dean steps forward, grinning and sliding the badge out of his pocket.

“Special Agent Jackson, FBI. Sheppard here has been helping us with our inquiries. We’re going to need to look at the scene, Officer. Who’s in charge?” He turns back to Sheppard and says smoothly, “John? Who do I need to talk to?”

The cop turns back toward the scene, sucking in a quick breath as a woman appears behind him. “That would be me,” she says, and then lifts her sunglasses to peer at Sheppard. 

Dean bites back a grin. “Looks like you’ve got another foster mother.” 

Sheppard aims a dirty look at him. “Shut up.” He steps forward, making a visible effort to school his features. “Elizabeth. This is Agent Jackson, FBI.”

His best smile on his face, Dean hands her a business card. “Is this your crime scene?”

Without glancing at it, she slips it into the pocket of an expensively-cut pair of jeans. “If it’s even a crime scene. We’re waiting for Dr. Marx – maybe he can tell us for sure. You want to take a look, be my guest.” 

The house’s interior is cool and dim and nearly empty, nothing but a rug on the living room’s tiled floor and a patio table, chairless, in the kitchen. Dean can hear a baby crying over the tinny sound of cartoon music. “What happened? And where’s all the furniture? They moving out?”

“In, actually.” Elizabeth leads them toward the back of the house. The cartoon music gets louder and then cuts out, and the baby’s crying settles into hiccups. A woman in shorts and a sports bra steps out into the hallway, closing the door behind her. When she sees them, she crosses her arms over her chest.

“Great. More crime-fighting superheroes?”

Dean takes his sunglasses off, but Elizabeth beats him to the punch. “Mrs. Mora, we’re not even sure there’s been a –“

“Not been a crime? Is that what you’re going to say, _again_?” She pushes past them, heading for the kitchen Dean had glimpsed through the empty dining room. “Tell that to my husband when he – oh, wait, he’s _missing_. You can’t tell him anything, can you, Detective?” She disappears, slamming a door behind her. 

Sheppard looks at her, opening his mouth as if to ask a question, but before he can, Elizabeth jerks her head toward the narrow carpeted stairs leading up from the hall they’re in. “Go take a look around. I’m going to check on the doc. And John –“ she lets her voice trail off meaningfully.

“Look Ma, no hands,” he says, with a glance at his sling. 

“We won’t touch anything,” Dean adds. “Don’t worry.” He touches Sheppard’s shoulder and heads up the stairs.

The master bedroom is crammed with all the furniture that the rest of the house is missing. A sofa in some indeterminate color, a small brown glass coffee table, even a handful of kitchen chairs are crammed into one end of the long room, while at the other end, a mattress, sitting on its box spring and flanked by a pair of cluttered nightstands, is angled out toward a sliding glass door. Through the half-open drapes, Dean can see a tiny patio and beyond it, mountains shimmering in the distance. In the middle of the bed there’s a figure, curled on its side and partially covered by a sheet. 

The feet sticking out from underneath the sheet are narrow and dirty, and as Dean gets closer, he can see that its toes are topped by cracked yellow toenails and straggling grey hairs. 

“Let me guess,” he says in Sheppard’s direction. “We pull that sheet back, we’re gonna see Henry Fonda from that movie about getting old in ponds.” He glances down at the nightstand closest to the body and picks up a folded piece of paper.

Sheppard reaches for the sheet and eases it up. “Less Henry Fonda, more Dumbledore,” he says. “But yeah, you were right. It doesn’t look anything like the bodies my guy was leaving behind.” Using the edge of the sheet, he gets a grip on the collar of the vic’s t-shirt and pulls it down far enough to expose the sternum. “Look.”

The man’s chest is spotted and sagging, but under its sparse covering of grey hairs the skin is unblemished. “Old guy boobs – awesome,” Dean says. “What am I looking at?”

“Nothing, that’s the point. My vics had a weird trauma pattern just here.” He lets the t-shirt go and points to the center of the man’s chest, just above a faded AC/DC logo.

Dean shrugs. “Your vics probably weren’t metalheads either.” 

“Point,” Sheppard says, and pulls the sheet back up over the victim’s face. “What now?”

Dean holds up a finger, listens for a moment, and slides open the top drawer of the nightstand next to the bed. There’s nothing interesting in it – condoms, lube, a GameBoy and a set of earbuds - so he closes the drawer and unfolds the paper he’s holding. When he catches a glimpse of the brushstrokes on the page, he starts to smile. “Gotcha, baby,” he coos at it, refolding it carefully before stashing it in his jacket.

“Got what?” 

Dean pats his pocket. “The pattern,” he says. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

*

Stepping out onto the front porch, Dean drops his sunglasses down over his eyes. Looking around, he spots the young officer who’d first approached them and, behind him and back on her phone, Elizabeth. She looks up as he starts down the walk, Sheppard beside him, and even at that distance, he can see that her full attention is trained on them. 

“Come on,” he mutters in Sheppard’s direction, and Sheppard’s head snaps up. “She looks like she’s interested in way more than your pretty face,” he adds. “If you had to guess, who would you say she’s talking to?”

“If we’re lucky, Dr. Marx’s secretary.”

“And if we’re not?”

“Head of the local FBI office.”

“Okay then.” Dean picks up his pace smoothly, climbing into the front seat just as Elizabeth starts to walk toward them. A second later, Sheppard lowers himself into the car and slams the door. Dean throws her into reverse and swings into a short two-point turn. Eyes flicking toward the figure in his rear-view mirror, he accelerates smoothly. 

As he fights his way out of the development’s cul-de-sacs and looping roads, he turns to Sheppard. “So you have a local FBI office?” 

“Oh yeah. Big shiny building, lot of confidential informants in the casinos. But I bet that’s not the number written on your card.” His voice is dry, and for the first time, Dean can’t tell if he’s joking or not. For that matter, given the _ex_ part of ex-cop, he can’t tell what’s driving Sheppard to tramp around crime scenes with him, other than the nagging thought that whatever he’d faced down in the desert had left a few buddies behind. Dean gets it. He’s never walked away from a monster either, although he’s pretty sure Sheppard isn’t thinking about it in those terms. 

Yet.

He sighs. He’s going to get answers out of Sheppard if he has to tie him to a chair and summon fucking _Crowley_ to intimidate him into talking. In the meantime, he still has a couple of things he needs, so he tries to paper over the whole issue without tripping over any of Sheppard’s delicate sensibilities. “No, it’s not. Google only gives you the main switchboard, and it’s usually better when brass talks to brass, you know?”

“So they say,” Sheppard says dismissively, shifting uncomfortably against the seat. “I don’t suppose you have more water in the car?”

“Time for mother’s little helpers?” He reaches into the glove box and pulls out his flask. Sheppard gives him an incredulous look but takes it, balancing it between his knees while he thumbs the lid off his painkillers. 

Dean drums his fingers on the steering wheel, thinking. He can’t leave Sheppard at his own apartment, and both the motel and the Blue Bunny are miles in the wrong direction. And leaving him in the car on a 110-degree day would accomplish what the creature’s bullets couldn’t. But it’s equally obvious to him that he needs to find the guy _someplace_ to get horizontal for a few hours – Dean’s more familiar than he likes to remember with the feeling of needing to give it all up to the power of whiskey and and even a crappy sofa. 

What he needs is someplace anonymous, someplace under the radar of the men in black. Someplace he can drop Sheppard for a few hours while he tries to find an artist with an uncanny talent for capturing the faces of young men.

Someplace like the Morning Mission. 

“I got an idea,” he says to Sheppard. “Can you get me back toward North Las Vegas?” Skid Row wasn’t all that big, and Dean’s pretty sure he can find the place again. 

“Highway’s off to the – hey, what’s in North Vegas?” Sheppard asks, and Dean can see his face change when he figures it out. “Oh, fuck no,” he moans, closing his eyes. “I’m a cop, not a vagrant.” 

Not pointing out the obvious, Dean gives him a toothy smile and, pleased at his own restraint, heads toward the freeway. Once he drops Sheppard off he can call Bobby, figure out if he's right that they're dealing with a witch who's good with a Sharpie. He can also grab something to eat and maybe refill the flask.

It’s never a good idea to go after witches on an empty stomach. Of course, it’s never a good idea to go after them _alone_ , either. 

*

The kid behind the desk smiles uncertainly at Dean when he walks Sheppard in through the front door. The room is mostly empty, a couple of men slumped in front of the big television in the corner.

“We close at six pm sharp,” he says. “You want me to call him a cab, I’m gonna need a couple of bills.” His eyes flick between the two of them, nakedly curious. Or maybe he’s just anxious to get back to whatever contest is making the people on the TV hit notes only hellhounds can truly appreciate. 

“Couple hours, I promise.” Dean glances down at his watch. Six pm gives him three hours. Which ought to be enough, providing the afternoon sun doesn’t turn _him_ into a tasty dried meat snack. 

“I’m right here.”

Maybe taking in the whining note in Sheppard’s voice, or remembering the badge Dean had flashed at him, the kid comes to some kind of mental compromise and slides a key across the counter. “We got a couple of rooms in the back. Nothing fancy, but if you lock the door, no one’ll come in.”

Sheppard holds out his hand. “Rodney McKay,” he says politely. “Much appreciate the hospitality. And your name is?”

“Aidan,” he answers after a moment, not looking like he believes Sheppard for a minute. “We’re pretty light today, so it’s no big deal.”

“Still.”

Dean muffles a cough, anxious to get on with things, not that he knows for sure what he’s going to do. He wishes he had a better plan than _tramp around downtown Las Vegas until he trips over the right artist_ but without Sam’s computer mojo or –

“Hey, do you know anyone in Bunco?” he asks Sheppard. 

“ _Bunco?_ What is this, the 1940s?” 

“That’s what – you know what, never mind.” Stupid plan, anyways. He’ll get further calling Bobby and asking if he’s got anyone wedged into the rolodex that might help. 

“You mean the guys who bust fortune tellers” Both Dean and Sheppard turn to stare at Aidan, and he coughs, a little dry sound. “My dad worked security at the Tropicana, had a buddy on Bu – that squad.” He turns back to the TV.

“Yeah, those guys,” Dean says loudly. 

Sheppard barks a laugh. “They run that one out of downtown. And no, I don’t even _want_ to know why you’re asking.” Addressing Aidan, he adds, “Mind showing me where that bed is?”

Aidan ducks out from behind the desk and, with a quick glance at the door, heads off toward the back, Sheppard on his heels. Dean pulls out his phone, paging through messages. He’s listened to all of them, knows they’re not from Sam. _Damn it, Sammy,_ he thinks, shoving his phone into his pocket. 

“Hey,” he says when Aidan reappears, “is your dad still in Vegas?”

“Reno, last I heard. You really need him, I’ll make a call.” He shrugs, flushing, and ducks back below the counter.

“Thanks.” 

“Six pm sharp,” Aidan reminds him, and Dean heads out into the afternoon, trying to remember how much cash he’s got in his pocket and wondering if the forty bucks that’s there is going to be enough. He throws the GTO a dirty look on general principles and takes out his phone.

*

Bobby, it turns out, can get him a Skype conference with a psychic in Silver City but his only Vegas contact ran afoul of the IRS a few years back.

“Do I want to know?” Dean asks, but only because Bobby sounds like he hasn’t been getting out enough since Dean left a week or so back. 

Bobby makes a disgusted noise but doesn’t answer, and Dean shrugs to himself. _Definitely_ not getting out enough, although that’s probably a good sign, all told. He glances up at the endless blue sky, shading his eyes - the sun is starting to drop into the west, and the street is busier than it was earlier. It’s still fucking hot, though. 

“Why do you need a psychic anyways?” Bobby asks him, and the sound of something being poured into a glass makes Dean’s mouth water. 

He gives himself a mental shake - _focus_ \- and pulls the sketch he’d snagged at the house that morning out of his pocket and shakes it open. “You ever hear of a witch working through pictures, anything like that?”

Bobby’s voice sharpens. “Define working.”

“Fuck, I don’t know. I got ancient dead guys and a couple of twenty-five year old wives who insist their husbands were twenty-five last time they saw them, too, and the only connection is that somebody drew a picture of them the day they died.”

There’s a long silence, and Dean’s about to hang up and redial when he hears more pouring noises. “Bobby?”

“Gimme a sec,” Bobby grunts. “Actually, no. Can you take a picture and send it to me?”

“What, you want to get a t-shirt made up?” Dean grumbles, but he spreads the drawing out on the roof and snaps a photo. “Hang on, I’m sending this. Call me back when you get it.”

Picture sent, he heads across the street to the liquor store he’d spotted earlier. A pint of Jack and a bag of chips later, his phone rings. 

“Find anything?” But it’s not Bobby’s angry rumble that greets him.

“Goddamn it,” Sheppard says, without waiting for Dean to answer. “I think there’s been another one.”

  


~*~  


When he pushes open the door to the Morning Mission, Sheppard, Aidan, and the two bums from earlier are clustered around the television. On the screen, a blond with a bullet-proof hairdo and a short red skirt is standing in front of a motel holding a microphone out to a woman in an even shorter skirt.

Dean watches for a moment, frowning, the motel’s pink façade and the palm trees on its neon sign sparking a memory. “Where is that place? Seems to me I’ve seen it before.” 

Sheppard glances up. Dean’s eyes follow his, but the only thing on the ceiling is a slowly-moving fan, its blades trailing cobwebs. Dean shudders, but Sheppard just says, “Listen.”

Dean listens, and now he can hear the sirens. He glances back at the TV, recognition dawning. “Holy shit, it’s right around the corner.”

“Four blocks, actually,” one of the clients says. “Place called the Palm Oasis.”

“Some oasis.” 

On the television, the newscaster has finished with the woman in the short skirt and is now talking to the camera, an earnest expression on her face. “Police say the body was found around noon today by housekeepers at the motel. No details are being released as of yet but Channel Seven, your twenty-four hour source for Clark County news, will be bringing you updates throughout the day. Back to you in the studio,” she says cheerfully, and the Palm Oasis is replaced by an elderly couple in separate bathtubs, holding hands and gazing out over a vineyard.

“Turn it off.” Dean hopes he never needs dick pills; he’s not sure he’ll ever want to take a bath in a field.

Aidan gestures with the remote, and the motel reappears. This time, there’s a young man in front of it, equally helmet-haired but dressed in khakis and a neat blue shirt with a little collar. “The victim’s name is being withheld pending notification of kin, but eyewitnesses report that he was elderly.” Behind him, a van labeled _Clark County Coroner_ is pulling into the parking lot. “Looks like we’ll know more soon,” he adds, and the camera follows him shakily as he sprints toward the van. 

He pulls Sheppard away from the little group. “You think your friend Elizabeth is going to be over there?”

“Different jurisdiction, although she might be, if Dr. Marx thinks the cases are similar.”

“You think she’s there _now_?” 

“No idea. All the same to you, I’d rather not find out for sure.”

Dean hadn’t liked the look she gave his business card; clearly, Sheppard hadn’t either. Being officially dead covered up a lot of paperwork errors, but still. “I wonder if –“ he starts, and his phone rings again. “Bobby! What do you have for me?” He turns away and walks toward the door, not surprised when Sheppard follows him out. 

Bobby lays it out, short and sharp and ugly. “I fucking hate witches,” Dean says, and jabs fiercely at the phone before throwing it into the back seat. 

On the other side of the car, Sheppard is gazing straight through him, something in the set of his jaw telling Dean that whatever he’s seeing, it’s not pretty. Sam had worn the same expression the morning after he found Dad’s journal.

As Dean remembers, even pancakes hadn’t helped remove it. “Get in,” Dean says on a sigh. “It’s a long fucking story, and I got to go see a man about a dog.”

*

Dean starts the car and shoves a tape into the deck. Next to him, Sheppard pops the glove box open.

“Here.” Dean reaches under the front seat and pulls out the bag he’d stashed under there. The bottle makes a sloshing sound, and Sheppard grins faintly. The smile eases some of the tension in his face, and Dean grins back.

“Long story?” he asks, and when Dean nods, he smiles again, wide enough to reveal a flash of white teeth behind the deep lines bracketing his mouth. Dean stares, wondering for bare half-second what the beard blurring the clean line of Sheppard’s jaw would feel like against his skin, and then blinks.

The _hell_ did that come from, he asks himself, and pulls out into the thickening traffic. 

“Where are we going?” 

Dean hands over his phone. “Bobby texted me an address. Can you get us there?”

Sheppard glances down at the phone. “Take the next right and head south. If I’m not mistaken, this is right off Fremont Street.”

“What’s Fremont Street?” Dean swings the car into the right lane without signaling and accelerates into the turn hard enough to make the tires protest. 

“It’s where all the tourists go who can’t afford the Strip, street performers and the girls who haven’t cut a deal with the casinos, too.” He glances at Dean, then says, carefully, “You want to tell me who and/or what we’re looking for? Since it’s not Halloween?”

“Halloween?”

“That’s usually the only time of year you see people dressed as witches.” 

Outside, the sun is dropping fast, sketching long shadows out in front of the motels and casinos starting to line the streets. There are tourists, now, too, lots of them, pointing up at the lights on the buildings and herding kids into fast food restaurants. 

People. Ordinary people. He glances over. Sheppard’s are eyes fixed on the street beyond the car’s windows, maybe struck by the fucking total grilled cheese and Campbell’s Soup normalcy of downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, United States of America. _Sheppard’s_ people, and Dean hears the distinct _thunk_ of a puzzle piece dropping into place. Maybe he hadn’t been all that far off the mark thinking Sheppard was a hunter. 

He snaps off the tape deck, cutting Jimmy Page off mid-riff. “Remember, couple days ago, you asked me if I’d seen anything weird about the first victim, and I asked you if you’d believe me if I said yes?”

Sheppard says, “Yeah,” as if he knows what Dean’s going to ask him. 

Dean asks the question anyway. “Why’d you believe me?” 

*

The story comes out in pieces, broken up by the _total fucking waste of time_ meeting with some old flame of Bobby’s and interviews with a half-dozen street performers. 

“Aliens,” Sheppard says. “The one you saw was part of some raiding party. Apparently it was trying to get home.”

_Aliens_? He should be more surprised, he thinks. Maybe the angels burned all the surprise out of him, all those years ago. Shaking his head, he walks up to a round-faced girl sitting in front of an easel covered in multi-color smudges of crayon. Small questions, small answers, he reminds himself, and this time it works.

“You get anything?” Sheppard looks like he’d gladly trade a body part for a change of subject when Dean gets back into the car. 

“Maybe? I don’t think she could draw Mickey Mouse after a visit to Disneyland, but she recognized the drawing I snagged from the last house.” Dean hands him a piece of paper. “She said the girl who did it lived at that address.” 

Sheppard unfolds the paper and peers at it. “This isn’t an address.”

“Twitter generation. They don’t have names, either, but she dropped our perp off there once.”

Sheppard directs them to a corner shared by a liquor store and a handful of boxy stucco buildings with car-crowded driveways. Dean parks at the far end of the lot and climbs out to lean against the car like he’s taking a smoke break, and lifts a pair of binoculars to his eyes. _Second floor, in the corner_ , the girl had said, but the windows are dark, no movement behind the blinds, so he drops the binoculars and says, hoping Sheppard’s ready to get back to it, “Aliens?”

Sheppard swings his door open and stretches his legs out. “Well, alien, really. Just one."

Dean sends him an incredulous look, and Sheppard lapses into silence. No wonder those fighters showed up that afternoon. Still, it was a good sign that enough weaponry could take them out, right? “So the men in black at your apartment were actually– you know what, don’t answer that.” 

Aliens. Fuck his life. 

He lifts the binoculars up to his eyes. 

“You could ask at one of the other buildings,” Sheppard suggests. “Maybe someone knows her.”

“Nah. I want to see what we’re dealing with first.” On the one hand, the girl he’d talked to might have been wrong, about either the artist or the address. On the other, nothing about this case has gone the way he expected it to, which means she should come strolling up any minute, maybe with a basket of muffins over her arm and a tat that says _STAB HERE_ over her heart and he’ll be done with the case _and_ fixed up with breakfast, all before the IHOP opens for the morning rush. 

Shit, if Sheppard could track an alien into the desert based mostly on a hunch, no reason Dean couldn’t find a witch by relying on someone who signed her name with a butterfly over the _i_. He shifts his position against the side of the car, feeling suddenly exposed, and glances down. Sheppard, back in the front seat, has fished out the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and braced it between his knees. As Dean watches, he uncaps the bottle with his good hand and lifts it to his mouth. 

“Look,” Dean says, mostly to distract himself from watching the muscles in Sheppard’s throat as he swallows, “Bobby said we’re gonna need to be careful going in. If she’s got any more pictures lying around, she’s going to try and burn them, which could mean more corpses.”

“And did _Bobby_ tell you how to kill this thing, if the opportunity comes up?” 

From the look on Sheppard’s face, Dean supposes that it’s a shorter leap from monsters to aliens than it is from aliens to monsters. He pats his boot. “Iron knife. If it bleeds, you can kill it.” He still wishes he’d managed to snag one of Castiel’s angel swords before – Well. _Before_.

“Good to know.” Sheppard recaps the bottle, stowing it away carefully. The light on the corner changes from green to red a couple of times before he says anything else. “Feel free to tell me how that works, okay? Because from here, it sounds a lot like – something that doesn’t actually exist.” 

“Like E.T. out in the desert?” 

“It gets worse. They showed up the first time in a hive ship,” he says, his voice expressionless, and tells Dean the rest of the story.

At the end of the story, _exposed_ doesn’t seem to quite cover how Dean feels. Turns out the plural of _alien_ covers a Leviathan-level catastrophe – faster, uglier, and just based on the sheer numbers the term “hive ship” seems to hint at, not something even Death could be harnessed to deal with. 

Fuck his life, indeed.

Sheppard, glancing over and reading that last thought, or maybe just reliving things, just reaches back under the seat for the Jack and hands it over. Dean slugs back a healthy shot and then another one. “So – the little grey men are a myth?”

Sheppard laughs, an unpleasant noise, like something torn to shreds is stuck in his throat. “Did you get a look at it before –?” 

Dean had. Edgar Winter with a submachine gun, he’d thought at the time, and it had walked through a good two clips worth of ammo. “And the fighters? Same folks that sent the men in black to your apartment?”

“More or less.” A long deep shudder goes through Sheppard’s lean frame. 

“What?” There’s more, he knows it, but Sheppard just shakes his head. “Hey, should you be --?” he starts to add, then, at the slap-clack of heels, lifts the binoculars back up to his eyes. Across the street, a tall redhead in long white shorts is aiming straight for the building he’s been watching. He hands the binoculars to Sheppard. “Ding dong,” he says, and takes off running. 

He gets to the edge of the parking lot and stops behind the bed of an oversized pickup. Pausing at the foot of a single flight of stairs, the redhead looks around, head cocked as if she heard his boots. Barely breathing, he waits until she starts moving before loping across the street. Three steps up, she stops again, and Dean heads for the building next door, studying the names on the mailboxes until the footsteps start up again. Once they do, he slips between the building and a large fleshy-looking plant, then edges around the corner and ducks into the first parking stall.

A light musical voice floats down the stairs. “If you’re here you know what I can do. Why don’t you come on up and let me show you why you’re going to leave me alone?”

Dean steps out from the dubious shelter of the carport and gazes up at her. She’s beautiful in all the right places, her skin flawless under the harsh security lights. All she’s missing is the muffins, really. He shifts his weight to feel the second knife snugged against his lower back, and grins up at her. “I’m not that kind of boy,” he says, “but let’s talk.”

*

She swings the door open onto yet another apartment stuffed to the gills with crap: one more plaid sofa than the room really needs, china statues on the tables, a television encased in a heavy wood cabinet - even a small wishing well in the corner. The walls are covered in pictures he can’t quite make out in the dim light from the TV’s bulbous screen. For everyone’s sake, he hopes they’re card-playing dogs. 

“Snazzy digs,” he says, but she just pushes past him, drops her keys on the table and flips on the room’s overhead light. Dean winces in the sudden glare and turns to study the nearest wall. Nope, not card-playing dogs. 

Huge eyes over a long ski slope of a nose stare back at him. The caricature captures more than the bone structure, though: the uneasiness in the set of the jaw is a good match for the tight crawl of _wrong_ Dean can feel on the back of his own neck. He does a quick scan of the wall, taking in a handful of Billy Idol wannabes up by the ceiling and, closer to a narrow hallway, a pair of porn ‘staches under curly perms. 

_Jesus, how many years?_ “I’m assuming all these guys are dead?”

She leans down to slide one of her high-heeled sandals off, massaging the knob at the base of her big toe briefly. “Most of them, yes,” she says absently. 

He glances back at the wall. To his left, pinned up in uneven rows, there are more drawings, small and sloppy, done in a hurry on whatever scrap of paper was lying around. All different guys, but newer haircuts, and a couple of them look like copies of the one he’d snagged earlier that day. 

He pulls it out to compare. _Patterns_ , he thinks, and spots the difference right away. On each of the drawings, faint but neatly inked letters in no alphabet he’s ever seen circle the heads like halos. He glances toward the older pictures, seeing the same faint shadows around the heads. 

Fighting to keep his expression non-committal, he turns back toward the woman. “So these are the spells?” he asks, and when she nods, pulls his old Zippo out and flicks it lazily. “Mind telling me why I shouldn’t just set fire to this wall?” 

Her gaze settles on the tiny flame, but then flickers toward the doors that line the hallway. As tells go, it’s maybe a little too easy, but an opening is an opening. He lunges sideways, reaching toward the first door, but she’s quick, baring sharp teeth under cracked and peeling lipstick as she gets a crushing grip on his hand. He snarls at her and kicks backwards, pivoting as he does so that when it flies open she spins past him into the room.

Dean grabs hold of the door frame and yanks himself to a stop before he can follow her. When his hand hits the light switch he flips it on. As light floods the tiny room he stares at the scene in front of him. Whatever he’d been expecting – blood-covered altars? Possessed easels? – it’s not this. 

A hospital bed takes up most of the floor space, an oxygen tank and a single monitor beeping beside it and an elderly man stretched out like a statue in the middle of it. As he pushes himself to a sitting position, the redhead leans down, touching the sagging planes of his face.

“Billy?” she says. “Billy, I’m sorry.”

“Jennie,” the old man says in a voice like dry leaves, and she twitches under his gaze. “It’s time, Jennie. You know it is.”

“Billy, no, I can draw him. Billy, he’s strong, it’ll work, he’s stronger than all those others. Billy, I promise…” 

He lifts his hand and touches one finger to her lips, smiling, and she stops. Dean glances from one to the other. The old man’s eyes are gray, the irises milky with cataracts, but when he turns his head toward Dean there’s calculation in their depths. “Did you say you had a lighter, young man?” 

Dean snaps the lighter open. The flame rises straight in the still warm air and the old man smiles and gestures Dean toward the door. But when he drops his hand back onto the blanket, Jennie lets out an anguished howl and launches herself at Dean.

Dean, half-expecting the move, jerks himself around the door jamb, but he’s not quite fast enough and she gets a grip on his jacket as she barrels past him, dragging him off the wall and onto the floor of the hallway. He rolls her as they go down and with his free hand reaches into his boot for the iron-bladed knife. The hallway is too narrow for the move, though, and they crash into a spindly antique table before he can get a grip on the knife, Jennie underneath him. 

He puts an arm over her throat before she can move and reaches for the switchblade he’d shoved into his waistband. Its silver blade gleams in the light from the bedroom. Pupils narrowed to pinpoints, catlike and intent, Jennie’s eyes follow its progress. 

“Tell me how all this works,” Dean growls at her. 

“You gonna let me go if I do?” She’s utterly still beneath him. Whether she’s waiting to catch him off guard or just _waiting_ he can’t tell. 

“Nope.” Sam could maybe do the math, figure out how many dead men’s portraits are hanging on the walls, but Dean doesn’t care about that. One’s enough with monsters, he’s found – despite the touching scene in the bedroom, they never find a new gig. He wants to know how the spells work, though, just in case.

He pulls back, but when she tries to push him away he lays the point of the knife along the base of her throat. “Okay then, you want play _Twenty Questions_ with a knife in your throat, be my guest. Let’s see – you find the marks, do the sketches and then the spells go on your copy. You got any more cartoons waiting for captions?”

She folds her lips together and Dean leans his weight onto the edge of the blade. A faint red line appears on her skin, but she stares up at him, defiant. “Wait a fucking minute. You’re not doing the spells, are you? He is.”

He scrambles to his feet, yanking her up by her arm and twisting it behind her back. He pushes her back into the small bedroom, but the bed is empty, oxygen hissing and the monitor beeping with increasing urgency.

Jennie reacts instantly, slamming her bare foot back into his kneecap and twisting out of his grip. Pain blossoms in Dean’s leg and as he falls back into the wall she spins around to face him, hands outstretched. Fighting to keep his balance long enough to get his weight into the thrust, Dean brings the long silver blade of his knife up, twists his wrist to put the honed edge up, and waits for her.

Out in the hallway, there’s the unmistakable _snap_ of a fire. A moment later, Jennie’s eyes meet Dean’s and, for an instant, she freezes. He wonders if she’ll stay frozen, but when the smell of smoke drifts into the room, she gives him a piercingly sweet smile, and falls forward onto the knife.

*

“I think I got it all out, but do you mind if I turn the oxygen off before we find out for-- _holy shit_.”

“Sheppard. What the hell are you doing here?” Dean checks for a pulse and lets the body fall to the ground. He thrusts his knife back into its sheath and leans back against the wall, trying to take his weight off the knee Jennie kicked.

Sheppard edges his way into the room and shuts off the oxygen. “I could ask you the same question.” 

“No, seriously,” he starts, but Sheppard isn’t paying attention. Instead he’s staring at the body on the floor as it twists and shudders, curling into a tight fetal ball. Jennie ages fast, her hair turning gray and then white, lips drawing up against her teeth and then falling back, scabbed and dry, into the cavern of her mouth. 

Once the things have stopped rustling, Sheppard leans down to press his fingers against the throat as if checking for a pulse. 

“Dead?” Dean hates to break the moment, but he’d really like to know where the old guy is and what he’s doing. Sheppard gives him a blank look, as if he’s still coming to terms with the fact of the now-ancient body at his feet. Dean tries again. “Old guy, about two hundred and fifty. Maybe setting shit on fire?”

“The one with no pants?” 

Dean breathes a sigh of relief. Noticing something other than monstermonstermonster is generally a good sign. “Wasn’t watching his ass, but he’s got my Zippo, and I’m not sure what’s going to happen if he tries to set the place on fire again.”

“I don’t think we need to worry about that,” Sheppard says, and hauls Dean out into the living room. Lying on the floor, in a pose weirdly similar to the woman in the bedroom, is the body of the old man – without his pants, sure, but clutching something to his chest and smiling peacefully down at it. Dean pulls the knife back out of its sheath and hobbles over to the body. Circling around behind it, he puts his thumb over where the carotid pulse should be, but there’s nothing there. 

“Awesome.” He reaches over and pulls what looks like some kind of family heirloom out of his hands. 

It’s a silver picture frame, elaborate and surprisingly heavy. “Do you suppose --?” Sheppard starts to say, and Dean unceremoniously yanks the velvet-covered back off the frame and tosses it onto the nearest chair. Inside the frame is the photograph he’d half-expected to see from the age of the old man: two young people in old-fashioned clothes, the woman pretty in a flowered dress and a small hat. She’s slightly taller than her companion, who’s wearing a military uniform of some sort. He hands the photo to Sheppard.

“Air Force,” Sheppard says, absently, and turns the photo over. There’s a folded piece of paper taped carefully to the back, a date - _May 14, 1942_ \- written on it in curlicued script, and below the date, in tiny letters, _Home safely to your Jennie!_.

“Ah, shit,” Dean mutters, and detaches the paper, unfolding it gingerly. On it is a face, captured in the middle of a laugh. Without the halo of the spell he can’t be sure, but it looks like the drawings in the hall, the ink faded to brown but clear enough to see that the expression in its eyes matches the one in the photo – and is identical to the one on the face of the man at Dean’s feet. 

Sheppard reaches over and takes the drawing out of Dean’s hand. “Going off to war. She’d have done anything to get him home safely,” he says, and watching him, Dean could swear it’s not the old people in front of them that he’s seeing. 

“Anything?” Dean’s familiar with the concept but Sheppard seems to need to answer the question.

“ _Anything_.” Sheppard’s voice is rough around the edges but firm, as firm as the signature on the old drawing. On what altar was Sheppard sacrificing himself, pulling a pop gun on an alien in the desert that day?

~*~  


Dean counts it as a win that they get down the stairs and across the street to the car without running into any neighbors. It’s an even bigger one that he’s able to get them onto the highway and out into the desert without any input from Sheppard, who’s immobile beside him, eyes fixed on the mile markers flashing by on the side of the road. “You okay?” he asks, halfway hoping he won’t get an answer.

And for a couple minutes he doesn’t. Finally, Sheppard reaches under the seat and takes out a bottle Dean hasn’t seen before. They’d been parked next to a liquor store; he’s surprised he hadn’t thought of it himself. “Pull over?” Sheppard says, and Dean slows down and turns off on the next break in the fence that cuts between them and the endless stretching landscape. 

He follows the road a little ways until it swerves around a haphazard pile of rocks, and turns the wheels off onto the hardpan of the desert floor. He lets the car run for a moment before shutting it off. The GTO’s been a lucky break, the first one in a long time: she’s not the Impala, just like Sheppard’s not Sam, but she’s got warrior blood, and it’s been easier than Dean thought it would be having both of them along for the ride. Given enough time and the tools now buried under the ruins of Bobby’s garage, he’s pretty sure he could make a hunter’s ride out of her. 

Out of Sheppard, too, he thinks; not much appears to faze him for long, and if he’s hiding something, which Dean suspects he is, because who _isn’t_ when you get down to it, at least he doesn’t seem to need to take it out and pick at it a lot. And Dean suspects he could cheerfully go a week without discussing anything deeper than the weather, which Dean likes. 

Plus, there’s always the fact that Sheppard, bullet wound, flop sweat and all, packs a lot of muscle onto his thin frame, and has a way of looking at Dean’s mouth that makes him think of bartenders making plans for when they get off shift. Dean, for one, has always counted it a service to help out with the kind of restlessness that hits at 3am. No reason he shouldn’t extend that courtesy to ex-cops, especially when their mouths seem to be made for -- well. Of course, last time the bartender wanted to make plans for the evening it didn’t exactly go like Dean planned, but he’s pretty sure he’d have heard if there were any more Egyptian gods floating around. And hey, at least this is one thing he won’t have to feel guilty about. 

Sheppard climbs out of the car as soon as the engine shuts down, slamming his door closed hard enough to rattle the car. Dean grins into the rear view mirror and joins him, leaning back against the side panel, and when Sheppard hands him the bottle, he twists the cap off and hands it back. 

This time, when Sheppard lifts it to his lips, Dean lets himself watch the slow rise and fall of the muscles in his throat as he drinks. The smell of whiskey expands in the cool night air, making Dean’s mouth water until he swallows hard, gulping like a cartoon Romeo. 

The look Sheppard gives him is laced with amusement. “Thirsty?” His nasal voice rasps against the quiet night, and he doesn’t take his eyes off Dean’s. 

“I could be talked into it,” Dean says, his own voice rough in his ears, and slides the bottle out of Sheppard’s hand. The whiskey slides over his lips, burning fire down into his belly, and he wipes his mouth on the back of his hand when he’s done, relishing the drag against his lips. 

“I think we passed _thirsty_ a few miles back,” Sheppard says, laughing, and sets the bottle back on the roof. “Dean – how the hell do you do this every day? Aliens, witches - you put a knife into that woman – what if she wasn’t a --?”

“But she was.” Sheppard blinks at him, and Dean wonders exactly what he’s been asked. He starts with the easy answer, or what he hopes is the easy one, anyways. “Sometimes you get lucky. All you need is the right weapon and whammo, no more big bad. Your guy needed serious firepower, but in the end? Just another monster.” 

_Easy_ , right. He’d come out to the desert hoping it was going to be going to be that way. He _deserves_ easy after watching Cas disappear into a lake and Sam into the hole Lucifer seems to be tearing in his brain. And in his world, this one _is_ easy. No guilt, no grief, no fucking _coping_ needed. Just a fast car and a sharp knife. He makes a frustrated noise in his throat and grabs the bottle off the roof.

“Look, Sheppard, you went Charles Bronson on that thing in the desert – don’t tell me you were going to try and cuff it and read it its rights?” 

A muscle twitches in Sheppard’s jaw. Not knowing if it’s amusement or an argument, Dean plows ahead. “It’s just – monsters, they always have a good reason for what they’re doing. Your guy wanted to phone home. Jennie back there wanted to keep her husband going. The last one I ganked – she had a kid. It’s still okay to kill them.” He’s not expecting much - this line hadn’t really worked with Sam, either - but he’d really like to get Sheppard back onto the right page, the one with the rest of the whiskey and hopefully a little hand action on it.

But the silence drifts on beside him. Even the car’s engine has cooled down and stopped ticking. Dean glances up at the dense curtain of stars over his head, marking the dark band on the horizon where the mountains meet the sky. There’s a smudge of light off in the distance, the casinos, he guesses. It reminds him that there are a bunch of other things he could be doing, but he doesn’t move.

Sheppard pushes himself off the car. He looks up at the sky for a long moment, and is eyes are clear in the bright starlight when he finally turns around. “Okay,” he says, and he sounds like he really is. “I can live with that.”

Dean steps closer, and Sheppard grips his shoulder, lets his thumb play over the curve of Dean’s bicep. “So, the thing in the dark is real and aliens are here. And you – people like you – kill them.” 

“Dude, you nailed the alien,” Dean says. “Or those F-15s did.”

Sheppard’s lips curve into a half-smile. “Thunderbolts,” he says.

“What?”

“Thunderbolts. Not F-15s.”

“And you know this how?” Dean asks, feeling the hairs rise on the back of his neck. Fucking Tommy Lee, he thinks. No way that stuff’s real.

Sheppard laughs softly, as if he can tell what Dean is thinking. “Did a couple tours in Afghanistan. First thing they teach you in pilot school is the name of all the cool stuff you probably won’t get to fly.” He loosens his grip on Dean’s shoulder and runs his fingers up the back of Dean’s neck and into his short hair. “So, since you know about these things, would you say this is just an adrenaline rush?”

His breath smells like whiskey, sharp and warm, and if Dean wanted to he couldn’t take his eyes off that mouth. So he leans forward and brushes his lips against Sheppard’s, close-mouthed until Sheppard inhales sharply and opens his mouth, sucking at Dean’s tongue with enough enthusiasm that Dean starts wondering if _hand action_ is aiming a little low. Finally Sheppard pulls back, breathing hard. “That would be a _no_ , then?” 

Wrapping his hands around Sheppard’s narrow hips, Dean pulls him forward, sucking in a breath as the other man’s weight settles against his erection. “Sheppard. What was the question again?” 

This time Sheppard laughs aloud, but the laugh ends in a sharp wince, and he pulls away from Dean to settle back against the side of the car. “Shit,” he mutters, and Dean can hear the entire day settling into his voice. 

Reaching around Sheppard, he opens the car door and fishes the bottle of painkillers out of the glove compartment. “One lump or two?”

Sheppard holds up two fingers and Dean hands him the pills and the bottle. Sheppard swallows obediently, but this time, Dean looks away. 

“It’s John, by the way.” Sheppard eases himself off the car and nods his head toward the door. “Could we --?”

“Yeah, no problem.” Had he really been about to get off, pressed up against a stolen car while the lights of Las Vegas shimmered in the distance? It really hasn’t been his year, is all he can say, but he stows Sheppard - _John_ \- away in the front seat and starts the car. There’s always the morning, he reminds himself. In his experience, showers worked wonders on any number of overly fucking complicated obstacles. In the meantime, he’d stolen all of 10cc’s back catalog along with the GTO, so he shoves _Original Soundtrack_ into the deck and puts them back on the road to the motel.

*

He’s heading back from the office the next morning, a pair of coffees stacked in one hand, when he sees a small dark-haired figure approach the door to his motel room and open it with one well-placed kick. _Men in black_ his mind supplies, stupidly, and sending the coffee spinning out onto the asphalt, he hauls ass across the parking lot. He comes to an abrupt stop on the stretch of wall between the window and the door, boot knife in hand, and holds his breath, hoping the voices he can hear will give him some indication of what he’s up against.

When he hears the first words, though, he rolls his eyes and sheathes his knife. 

“John! I thought I warned you about –“

The last time he’d heard that voice its owner had been holding his, Dean Winchester’s, wallet, which she’d lifted from his pocket. He steps around the doorframe and into the room. “Teyla!” he says, and she turns around, moving with what he can only call _majesty_. Impressed, he smiles at her. “Did you bring breakfast? I’m pretty sure John here is about to die of starvation.”

Identical scowls greet this statement and he stops in his tracks, putting his hands up. “Hey, whoa, I’ll just go get more coffee, how’s that?”

“No, stay here,” Teyla says, sounding annoyed. “I’ll be right back.” Giving the door a cursory glance as she passes it, she walks out, and Dean lifts an eyebrow in John’s direction. 

“Did you press the wrong number on speed dial?” he asks. “Or is there something about her I need to know?”

“Other than the mom radar? No, Teyla’s good people, I’ve known her for years.” John folds the sheet down to his belly and cranes his neck to look at the bandage on his chest. ”Plus, she’s a fucking good doctor.”

Dean gives him a skeptical look and crosses the room to peer into the refrigerator. He pulls out a bottle of water and cracks the cap off it. _Not coffee_ , his lizard brain reminds him, and failing to keep the irritation out of his voice, he says, “Yeah? What’s she doing moonlighting as a whorehouse doc then?” 

Before he can answer, a large pink box is shoved into his hands. “Here, keep yourself occupied,” Teyla says. “I need to speak with John, and in any case, my choice of practice is none of your concern.”

Marching up to the bed, she hoists a black nylon bag off her shoulder and drops it, with some precision, into John’s lap. “Tell me what this is,” she says, and if Dean didn’t know better, he’d swear her breath was crystallizing in the suddenly frozen air.

“Money?” John says, looking like he’s not sure himself.

Dean drops the donut box onto the table and eases himself down onto a chair. _Money_? So that’s why John was clutching the thing like it contained the very last six-pack of Duff beer. 

“I figured that part out, John. What I want to know is why you left it in my trailer.”

John’s eyebrows shoot up, making him look a little like a kid forced to explain a broken lamp. “I thought you could use it?” 

“That part, too, I figured out! What I want to know, John, is _why_ do you feel you still owe me anything, after all these years?”

John picks nervously at the sheet but doesn’t answer her. Watching him, she sighs, and there’s a harsh bright thread wrapped around the kindness in her voice when she speaks. “Afghanistan was a long time ago. You tried, John – you did everything you could, and it’s not your fault you couldn’t bring him back.” She looks down, and after a long moment, picks up the bag and slings it over her shoulder. “You do know that it will not help, giving me this?” 

When he nods, she turns to Dean. “You look like you have some experience with this. Tell him, please, that it is not his fault if _everything_ is not enough.” She holds his gaze for a long moment, and finally, reluctantly, Dean nods. “Enjoy the donuts, gentlemen,” she adds, and as she walks out the door, Dean wonders if he should check them all for hex bags first. 

*

He watches her until she disappears from view before wedging a chair under the broken door. “Money?” 

“Money.” John eases the sheets back and swings his legs down from the bed. His hair is sticking up in a thousand directions, there’s a crease from the pillow running down into his beard and he’s looking over at the box of donuts with a predatory gleam in his hazel eyes. Dean, caught somewhere between the desire to laugh and the memory of how it felt when the same look was turned on him the previous night, tries to recall what his point was. 

“Um – whose?” 

“Belonged to the alien. Apparently they could read minds – the guy was picking up spare change playing high-stakes poker.”

“Huh.”

John stands up, stretching carefully. “Funny thing was, if he’d stuck to the offshore games, he could have flown below the radar until he got his transponder, or whatever the hell it was, built.”

“Well, except for the bodies.”

“Yeah.” He runs a hand over his beard, grimacing. “Is there a razor in that bag of yours?”

Dean drags his eyes away from the strip of belly visible above John’s boxers and lets the rest of the questions go in favor of the only one whose answer he’s halfway interested in at the moment. “Gonna need any help with that?”

John moves his arm, wincing broadly. “I think I might,” he says, on a laugh that tells Dean everything he needs to know. As his dick goes from _curious_ to fully on board, he manages to choke out something about shaving cream, and follows John into the room’s tiny bathroom. 

This time, there’s no hesitation when he grips John’s arms, pulls him in for a fast kiss and pushes him toward the toilet. “Sit,” he says, and yanks up on the tap. He lets it run until steam starts to drift over the mirror, then soaks a towel, wrings it out and, straddling John’s bare thighs, wraps it around his jaw. The towel is rough beneath his palms, and he can feel the vibration in John’s throat as he makes an inarticulate noise into the wet cloth. 

Dean nudges John’s head back, leaving the towel in place while he grabs the shaving cream off the counter. It’s the cheap stuff, sharp and medicinal, but it foams up like only petrochemicals can, and he carefully warms a gob of it between his palms before pulling the towel off John’s neck. 

“Are you sure about this next part?” John lifts his head and opens his eyes. “I mean, I haven’t actually seen you _use_ that knife you keep pulling out of your ass…”

Dean snorts. “Not where I keep it. Now put your head back or I’ma grab a straight razor out of the car.” Swallowing audibly, John closes his eyes and, leaning back slowly, offers his throat to Dean. “Son of a bitch,” Dean mutters, and closes his foam-filled hands on John’s face. 

*

It takes two razors and another handful of shaving cream, and about midway through Dean starts to feel like every rasp and scrape of the razor is settling somewhere low in his belly, wrapping tendrils of _wantwantwant_ around his spine, but he finally finishes. 

“Don’t move,” he says, and, dropping the second razor into the trash, turns the hot water back on and holds the towel underneath it until it’s soaked and steaming. John sighs when the cloth hits his face, tilting his head back to let Dean ease it over the planes of bone and muscle and press it down into the pulse points in his throat. When he pulls it away he can see he’s done a good job: John’s fine skin yields under the pressure of his fingertips, smooth enough to give him back the calluses on his own hands. 

He wipes at John’s hairline before dropping the towel onto the floor. “I can smack you if you’d like,” he says lightly, and John stretches out the vertebrae in his neck with a pop before opening one eye. 

“Not necessary.” Opening the other eye, he gazes up at Dean, and Dean can feel the weight of the air in the room double, triple, quadruple as John’s mouth opens in a wicked grin. “I can think of another use for your right hand.” 

“Yeah?” Dean says, because he honestly can’t come up with any other words, and after what feels like hours of running his hands up John’s throat, around his jaw and over his face, he’s harder than he can remember being since, well, longer than he’s really a fan of. 

Being, that is. Hard. “Oh, fuck yeah,” he adds on a long sighing breath, and John reaches up and unzips his jeans. There’s a scrape of cloth and steel teeth as he pushes the fabric down to catch at the tops of Dean’s thighs, and Dean can’t drag his eyes away from the sight of his own dick, curving up toward his belly and glistening with moisture at the tip. And he wants to do what he usually does when faced with that sight, which is wrap his hand around it, tighten his fingers until the pressure builds up at the base of his spine and the back of his head and he –

There’s a strangled noise from the vicinity of his dick and Dean looks up, the gleam in John’s eyes making him try to untangle his fingers from the jeans bunched around his hips. His dick twitches, sparks cascading through his belly at the movement. 

“Touch yourself,” John says, his voice ragged enough to convince Dean that he should just do what the man says. 

He lifts his hand to his mouth and licks his own palm, and bracing his legs against John’s, takes himself in hand and starts to stroke. His touch is light at first, teasing, focusing on the slip-rasp of his palm against the soft skin, but it’s not enough for long, and he tightens his grip and slows it to a deep hard stroke, canting a glance at John as he slides his thumb through the dampness at the tip of his dick.

John is leaning back against the wall, his heavy-lidded gaze not moving from Dean’s fist and his legs spread wide enough for Dean to see the erection tenting his boxers. As he watches, John runs his tongue around his lips, leaving a glaze of moisture on the lower one, and Dean bites down on a curse and grips the base of his dick, hard – it’s been a long time since he’s had a man’s mouth on him, and he wants to slide his dick across those lips and put his hands back on John’s face, feel himself thrusting into the hot wet heat of –

“Come here,” he mutters, and reaching for John, pulls him forward until he can tease the head of his dick across that lush mouth. John sucks in a deep breath and glances up at Dean. His eyes are dark, pupils wide and the skin over his cheekbones flushed with want. “Jesus, what do you want, an invitation?” 

Slipping his hand around Dean’s hipbone, John pulls him in. “Let me,” he rasps, and nudges Dean’s hand free, replacing it with his own, and guides Dean into his mouth. Dean fists his hands into John’s soft spiky hair and closes his eyes. 

His world narrows down to pure sensation, the swirl of a tongue around the sensitive head of his dick and the press of lips and teeth against its underside as he’s drawn into the tight suction of John’s throat. He’s holding on, fighting the tension coiling around the base of his spine until John starts _humming_ against him, the vibration amplifying the arousal until he’s either got to move or come, and then it’s too late because it crests and breaks and he’s doing both, hips rhythmless against John’s restraining hand. 

John eases him through the last rolling shudders and lets Dean slip out of his mouth with a quick swirling movement, enough to make Dean grip the edge of the sink behind him in case his knees give out for real this time. He wants to touch his fingertips to the beard-burned patches on his thighs, roll around in the sparks still cascading down his spine, but at a quiet noise from John, he opens his eyes. 

John is leaning back against the wall, eyes half-closed and a bright smear of Dean’s come clinging to his lower lip. Lazily, he lifts his hand, thumbs it off and slides his fingers between his lips. As Dean’s breathing starts to speed up, he lets his legs fall open, his dick an obscene bulge against the worn flannel of his boxers.

“Holy crap,” Dean mutters, and drops to his knees.

The tiles are cold and the peeling corner of one of them is sticking straight into Dean’s patella, and the bathroom is so small his feet are wedged up against the plumbing, but when he eases John’s shorts down over the head of his dick he can see the muscles fluttering in his belly and the moisture faintly glossing the skin, and there’s nothing for it but to wrap his hand around John’s shaft and _move_. It’s been a couple of years since Dean had another man’s dick in his hand but somewhat less than that since he’d jerked off to the _idea_ of it – a lot less, actually, if he counts waking up that morning, rock hard and wondering what Sheppard would taste like if –

“Jesus,” John says from somewhere above him, “do I need to draw you a picture?” and Dean, startled, glances up and laughs, and John gives him a rueful grin. “Yeah, no,” he adds. “It’s just –“ and then his eyes go dark as Dean starts moving again, and apparently it’s a movement John _likes_ , because this time his hips get into the action.

Dean watches John’s face until he can’t anymore, until the roll and thrust of his dick in Dean’s hand speeds up and syncopates, and then he drops his eyes to the head, fat and red and glistening in his fist, and lowers his mouth until it’s thrusting salt-sharp between his lips. Wrapping the other hand around the ellipse of John’s ass, he pulls John forward, urging him in until his mouth and throat are full and his head is swimming with the pressure and musk of him, and when John’s thrusts lose the beat completely he tightens both hands, and lets John come.

When he looks up, finally, grabbing a towel to wipe off his mouth, John’s eyes are closed, his lashes wet and the hair at his temples curling in the damp heat of the room. Dean towels him off none too gently and pushes him into the shower, and turns the water onto them both. 

*

Even motels eventually run out of hot water, and this one’s no exception. Regretfully, Dean reaches down and shuts off the water when it drifts toward lukewarm, slides the curtain back and pushes at John’s water-slick ass until he climbs out of the tub.

“What now?” John wraps a towel around his waist and reaches for the door. It swings open on a rush of cool dry air, and Dean watches him as he makes his way across the room toward the box of donuts still sitting on the coffee table. Shivering, he towels off quickly and steps into his jeans.

He thinks he may know the answer to that question, thanks to the TV next to the coffee machine in the motel’s tiny office – or rather, thanks to the headlines running underneath the weather report. Dead psychics in a town known for aliens. Piece of fucking pie, if Dean’s any judge. He only hopes the little town on the chyron is near a body of water and not out in the middle of a desert.

_Now_ he just needs to figure out how to make a more or less graceful exit.

*

Sheppard glances up as he steps into the room, and from the suddenly-blank look on his long handsome face, Dean can tell he’s doing that mind-reading thing again. Hell, maybe he should take Sheppard with him.

“You should really go after him,” Sheppard says, and Dean shivers again, even though he’s no longer damp and cold. On second thought, scratch that idea. His luck, he’d end up having to save the guy’s life a second time, and nobody but your actual brother should have to carry that weight.

“Go after who?” He reaches blindly into the donut box, not caring if Sheppard realizes he’s stalling.

“Sam.” Sheppard tightens his hand on the towel knotted around his waist. “You – last night, you were having a nightmare. Or something. I didn’t want to wake you up.”

_Sammy_. The ache hits him in the middle of his belly, sharp and needlingly familiar. And yeah, Dean should probably go after him. “Like you did?” he says, still stalling. 

“Yeah, like I did.” Sheppard's jeans are lying on the chair where Dean dumped them the night before, and turning his back to the room, he lifts them up, shakes them out and steps carefully into them, balancing with one hand on the back of the chair. 

He’s pretty much still moving like a man who’d taken a bullet at the hands of something inconceivable, and Dean has a moment of wanting to put something large and fierce between Sheppard and the knowledge that the things from the supermarket magazines were real. He’d put Dad and then himself there for Sam, was still putting himself there for Sam, although it wasn’t getting him any goddamn thanks. Or, apparently, doing any good - Sam was pretty adamant about needing to be gone.

Well, fuck the bigger questions, he thinks, and offers Sheppard something else. “Sam’s my brother,” he says, and in the moment of saying it, gets a glimpse of just how big a lie he’s been telling himself. 

Sheppard looks up from buttoning his shirt. “All the more reason,” he says. “It’s not losing them that’ll kill you. It’s knowing you had a chance to keep them and didn’t take it.” 

And if there’s a second meaning to his words, Dean can’t read it in Sheppard’s eyes, but he feels it in his gut, as the ache expands to fill the hollow space under his ribcage where his ability to breathe used to live.

_Sam._

And there’s a conversation he can’t see ever having, so he reaches for a second donut, licking most of the jelly, blood red and chemical sweet, out of the center. He’s contemplating a third before he remembers that Sheppard’s still in the room.

“Look, can I drop you someplace? Doc Emmagan’s, maybe?” 

Sheppard picks up his linen jacket and gives it a critical look. Somebody at the Blue Bunny had gotten most of the blood out of it, and the bullet hole doesn’t really show up against its dark rough fabric. Throwing a quick glance at Dean, he slides his good arm into one sleeve, and Dean stands up and dusts his hands off before moving across the room.

Taking the jacket’s collar in one hand, he guides Sheppard’s left arm into the sleeve, easing it into place without moving his wounded shoulder. When he’s done, he lays a careful hand over Sheppard’s lapel, feeling the torn edge of the cloth against his palm and below it, the slow beat of Sheppard’s heart.

Sheppard lifts his gaze from the ring on Dean’s hand, and for the first time, his eyes are clear and unshadowed, the ghost of something Dean’s seen on hunters’ faces before tightening his mouth. Rolling his shoulders to settle them more firmly into his jacket, he steps back a half-pace and jams his hands into his pockets. “My apartment?” he says, sounding faintly embarrassed. “I figure those SUVs are still there, and McKay said he doesn’t think the Wraith are quite done with Earth, so…” He lets his voice trail off, and Dean blinks at him for a moment and then grins widely.

“I knew it,” he says. “Fucking hunters. Spot ‘em every time.” He pulls out his phone and then, glancing at Sheppard, snaps it closed and puts it away. “You know what, no. You need any help with these Wraith, _call someone else._ Sam and I are gonna be busy, I’m damn sure.”

Let the Air Force deal with this one. They’re the ones with the big toys, and now they’ve got Sheppard.

_Aliens_. Fuck his life.

~*~The End~*~


End file.
